Silence

My head is a lot louder than the rest of the world around me.

Impostor syndrome is a loud thing, a judgment that interrupts and demands acknowledgment. It will have you begging your choir director to please not dock your grade for missing a week of rehearsals to visit your dream school that you still can’t quite believe you actually got accepted to, you know this puts you at four absences but if it helps, that one earlier this semester was from a different school visit, you know you should have told him that beforehand but at the time you honestly believed you wouldn’t get into this school. And it will leave you surprised and humbled and with a strange twinge of guilt when he reminds you that you’ve hardly missed any rehearsals in four years, so yes of course you can visit that top-tier engineering school without punishment.

When my head is so loud and so judgmental, it’s no wonder I’m daunted by every new task. It’s no wonder every opportunity is drowned out by the chorus of but I’m going to screw it up.

Meditation helps silence the judgment. For a few precious minutes, I hear nothing but my breaths. I’m trying a new idea, too. What would happen if for my nightly journaling, previously a shallow grave where I buried my fears to keep them from stalking my mind, instead I focused on the happy? Not giving fears the power they don’t deserve, but instead searching for the joy hidden among them? It makes me realize just how long it’s been since I honestly looked forward to a new school day. How many evenings have I wasted dreading the morning? How many mornings have I wasted hating the day?

One point of joy to start with: I spent the last two days designing a solar cell. My solar cell. I’m going to see my solar cell all the way through from conception to crystal growth to operation. I want to go back to 9th grade me and tell her, Hey, we did it. You didn’t give up on me. I did right by you.