Imposter syndrome

When I was in College, every time I walked into one of my computer science classes I could feel the unwelcome energy from the guys. Thankfully the class had some girls too, it was a class of around forty and of those about five were girls. In most cases I usually would just ignore it and go about minding my own business. But as time passed, and being only human there was a desire to be accepted by the group.  One thing I had noticed was that one of the girls who is till this day a close friend seemed to have their respect because she was usually top of the class.  The mindset of most guys at the time, was that this is a boy’s thing, so the only explanation of a girl’s presence there was that you were really smart. Even after I graduated and I would tell people mostly guys what I do the response was “Oh, you must be very smart.”

The only problem is I don’t think I am the smartest person in the world, and while in college I certainly was not top of my class. But somehow this experience developed a mindset in me that to be accepted in the tech world I had to be the best. After all I was coming into the industry already disadvantaged because of my gender and color. So I questioned my validity in being this industry, I have often felt like an imposter being in a place I am not supposed to be in. By now I believe most of us know or have heard of the term imposter syndrome. And can be experienced by either gender feeling like they do not belong in the space that they occupy. I had a fellow developer, a guy and who once talked about his own feelings on imposter syndrome based on his own experiences.

In my case I felt this very strongly when dealing with being able to talk about my love for software development/engineering publicly. Because mind you in my head, the only people worthy to even speak about tech especially as a woman were those that had excelled in the industry. Like my friend who after gaining a distinction in her degree was hired by the University soon after graduation. Because being outstanding made us worthy to be in this boys club. I internalized this by being very critical of myself, especially when I found it hard to grasp a concept. Or I couldn’t solve a problem quickly enough, always judging myself against my male colleagues and needing to be perfect

Over the years I have worked on finding my voice and worthiness in being in this industry, learning to understand that I needed no one’s permission to be here, but this only dealt with things at the surface level. Recently I was confronted with these thoughts and feelings when I decided to start writing a technical blog on hashnode which is a blog platform for developers and tech enthusiast.  While in my own tech journey I noted that when I would read resources/documentation and they had theses big technical terms I couldn’t understand I would feel frustrated. However If I broke these words down to a simpler meaning I was able to grasp the concept. So wanting to do the same to other concepts I thought writing a technical blog would be good

But lo and behold the voices of imposter ness descended telling me it was not my place. So I knew I had to start dealing with imposter syndrome issue and not just stuffing it down hoping it will go away. I realized it had to deal a lot with me not feeling worthy to be a software engineer, primarily due to so many factors one being how historically this has always been male dominated space and they claimed monopoly over it. While doing some introspective thinking, I remembered something Oprah once said about worthiness. Most of us believe that who we are, what we do, where we came from defines our worthiness but the truth of the matter is that by virtue of being alive we are worthy.

Because if the creator saw it fit to give us life, who has the right to say otherwise. Then it hit me that if my creator(God) saw it fit to give me this desire to do and love what I do, no one has the monopoly of saying otherwise. And because of that I am worthy to be in this space and so are You. 

                                                                         💚💚💛