I’ve had a hard time writing this week’s Love Your Blog post. The prompt was Ugly. Ugly can encompass a lot of things in knitting. A project that just didn’t work. A hopelessly tangled skein. Gauge problems. Here in this house, ugly can be used to describe my desk and workspace. It’s bad. So bad that it’s almost what I shared this week. But, what’s been plaguing me lately is ugly thoughts. Not ugly thoughts about others but about myself.

I’m not good enough. I’m not creative enough. I don’t publish enough. I don’t work hard enough. One of biggest fears is that at TNNA, the upcoming knitting tradeshow, people will think “Why in the world is she even here? She has a booth? Why?”

I know all of these things are untrue. If I wasn’t good enough, people wouldn’t buy my patterns. Publishers wouldn’t publish my patterns in their magazines. People wouldn’t want to work with me.

Imposter Syndrome, you suck and you’re ugly.

From this article at Fast Company:

As the Harvard Business Review states, folks who always feel like they’re imposters are often also perfectionists, people who set “excessively high, unrealistic goals and then experience self-defeating thoughts and behaviors when they can’t reach those goals …perfectionism often turns neurotic imposters into workaholics.”

Oh my gosh, yes, except in my case, it doesn’t turn me into a workaholic, it turns me into a procrastinator. I’ll put off even the simplest tasks because something didn’t live up to my own expectations. Then I’ll stress out because I’ve left things for the last minute, then it doesn’t meet my expectations because I had to compromise on something to get it done in time, and the whole cycle repeats itself. Ugly, I’m telling you. Ugly.

We all experience Imposter Syndrome, whether it’s regarding our job, our parenting abilities, or our knitting skills.

Do you have Imposter Syndrome sometimes? How do you deal with it?