Dealing With Impostor Syndrome

Every Monday morning is motivational Monday at Operation Spark, where the students and teachers gather up in a circle to sum up the coming week's events after a mantra:

"I belong, you belong. I'm smart, you're smart. I'm talented, you're talented...."

When I first had to do it, it made my eyes roll and gave me flashbacks of working at Wal-Mart with their equally cringe chants every morning of my painful stint in retail. But after one of my roughest weeks in the program, I understand the importance of it.

What you're getting into

If you ever take a look at the Programmer Humor subreddit, you'll notice a common theme: Coding is pain.

• Countless hours of debugging and scary red error messages- only to find it was a typo your brain just completely ignored.

• Installing a program you desperately need to make a project that won't work and finding one forum post from 2008 with no solution to the exact obscure error you're having.

• Scouring page after page of documentation that reads like a stereo manual just to find that one freakin' command you need.

• Making a Stack Overflow post for what you felt like was a insurmountable problem only to be meet with snark and bile because god forbid you ask a question that someone else already did.

This is just a small list of the frustration that awaits you.

But the worst part is, sometimes you just don't get it. You sit there staring at the screen and your bajillion tabs open in Chrome and all you want to do is bash you face against the keyboard. Tossing code at the wall, hoping it sticks.

All the while frustration mounts as the clock ticks down to your deadline, and if you're anything like me: you just snap.

The Downward Spiral

Sitting on the steps outside of the building, puffing on a cigarette, the thoughts started creeping in.

"You're not cut out for this, you're too dumb to figure this stuff out, you're going to fail the test and waste six weeks of your life thinking you could be some code cowboy."

Next thing I knew I was hiding in the bathroom, tearing steaming down my face, seriously debating swearing off every touching a keyboard again. But as my colleagues and teachers reminded me: Everyone has been there.

That feeling of being lost, frustrated, and confused is a common experience- not just in coding but in life in general. Nothing worth doing comes without pain and hurting now only makes you stronger later.

Pulling Yourself Back Up

The most important thing is, don't beat yourself up for that moment of weakness. Anxiety, doubt, and depression have been plaguing people for as long as there have been people. As Shakespeare had written in Measure for Measure:

“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”

And we've been talking about that guy for hundreds of years, so he must of been onto something.

So, just remember, 'I belong, I'm smart, I'm talented. You belong, you're smart, you're talented.'

Keep fighting, struggle through the pain, come out the end a better person, and don't feel discouraged when the darker parts of your mind creep in.