I Still Don't Believe I'm Supposed to Be Here
April 20, 2026
And I've been doing this long enough to know that's not going to stop me anymore.
I almost didn't write this one.
Not because I didn't have the words. I had too many. I started three different drafts and deleted all of them because they all sounded like someone trying to sound like they had it figured out. And that's kind of the whole problem, isn't it?
Imposter syndrome doesn't just make you feel like a fraud. It makes you feel like a fraud for talking about being a fraud. Like even your confession is performative. Like you're doing it wrong.
"Who are you to talk about healing? You're still healing."
That's the voice. Maybe you know it. Maybe it lives in the back of your throat right before you hit send, right before you raise your hand, right before you show up to the thing you actually care about.
Mine shows up when I'm doing well. That's the cruel irony. Not when I'm struggling... that part almost makes sense. But when things are actually working? When someone reaches out and says something I wrote helped them? That's when the voice gets loud.
They don't know the real you. They're responding to a version of you that doesn't exist.
Give it time. They'll figure it out.
Here's what nobody tells you about imposter syndrome.
It's not about your actual competence. It never was.
Imposter syndrome is rooted in something much older than your career or your blog or whatever room you walked into and felt like you shouldn't be in. It's rooted in the belief, learned, not born, that you have to earn your right to exist. That belonging is conditional. That love and acceptance are things you have to perform well enough to keep.
For a lot of us, that belief didn't come from nowhere. It came from childhoods where we were praised for performing. Where we were loved more when we were easy. Where the adults around us were too overwhelmed to deal with our full selves, so we learned to show up smaller, quieter, more manageable.
And then we grew up. And we started doing things. Real things. Things that matter. And our nervous system, bless it, is still running on that old code. Still waiting for someone to figure out we're a fraud. Still bracing for the moment the approval gets yanked away.
Imposter syndrome is not a flaw in your character. It's a scar from learning that you had to earn your place in the room.
The part that actually helped me.
I stopped trying to fix it.
I spent years trying to think my way out of it. Collecting credentials. Seeking validation. Waiting until I felt ready, until I felt legitimate, before I let myself take up space. But the threshold kept moving. Every time I hit a milestone, the voice just recalibrated.
Okay, but now you need to do THIS to actually deserve it.
What shifted for me wasn't silencing the voice. It was realizing I didn't have to answer it. The voice could say whatever it wanted, and I could still show up. I could still write the post, take the call, sit in the room. Not because I felt confident. But because I decided that my fear of being found out was no longer allowed to run my life.
That is not a small decision. It is an ongoing, exhausting, worth-it decision that I have to make most mornings.
What I want you to hear.
If you are doing something brave, something that matters to you, something that requires you to be seen, and you are terrified of being exposed as someone who doesn't know enough, hasn't done enough, isn't enough:
You are not a fraud.
You are someone who cares deeply about doing it right, which means you're probably doing it better than you think. The people who truly don't know what they're doing aren't usually the ones lying awake wondering if they're doing it wrong.
You're allowed to be in the room. You don't have to earn it again today. You don't have to be the most qualified, the most healed, the most certain.
You just have to keep showing up.
I'll be here doing the same.
A question to sit with:
