There’s a term for the feeling that you’re not as good as people think you are. That you’ve fooled them somehow, and eventually they’ll figure it out. That your success is luck or accident rather than skill or effort. Impostor syndrome is real. It keeps genuinely talented people from putting their work into the world, from taking the seat, from raising their hand.
My son doesn’t have it.
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I got feedback from the editor a few weeks ago.
The notes were better than I expected. The voice is working. He found no places where it breaks. He called it a strong draft and said he didn’t have a long list of major overhauls. For a first editorial assessment on a memoir I wrote alone over several years, that landed well.
But one note stayed with me.
The arc flattens in the back half. The first seventy or eighty pages have urgency and momentum. After the new normal is established, readers lose the driving question. He wanted to feel spikes on the seismograph. Major moments, framed with more intention, so readers stay invested.
I knew exactly what he meant. I’ve been reading spikes on a graph for twelve years. Just not a seismograph.
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I’ve been listening to a book called Mattering. One of the early chapters is about the weight that comes from someone depending on you, and what happens when that weight disappears. The author tells the story of a woman who cared for her elderly mother for years. When her mother passed, she didn’t just grieve the loss. She grieved something more specific. The absence of being needed in that particular way, every day, by someone who depended on her for it.
I recognized something in that. Not the same loss, but the same shape.
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I typed the last word sometime in the spring. I closed the laptop and sat there for a minute.
That was it. Twelve years. Fifty-nine chapters. Done.
I didn’t know what to do next.
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I was at my desk when he walked in.
He had something behind his back. He told me to pick a hand, which is something we’ve done forever — the other person always swaps the item to the other hand at the last second, holds it out, says “oh well.” I stopped what I was doing and turned toward him in my chair.
I knew what this was.
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