Wearing my writing impostor hat

After writing many design documents and ADR-s. After helping various teams make their documentation great. I went in and had a full blown impostor syndrome about writing publicly. For at least 2 years 🤡

Between 2004 and 2010 I had a blog where I was writing about my experiences with Linux. I was mostly breaking the kernel configs so that the fan no longer worked. I had to recompile it again without fan hoping the computer would not melt. Or I tried using emulated transparency with Enlightenment 0.17. So I wrote about all this. I was writing about my random life struggles. And looking back I think my blog back then was quite silly. But it connected me to many people, got me a few jobs too.

In the last few years I was helping teams make their docs great with the Divio documentation system. I can’t stress how awesome it is. I was writing decision drafts, proof of concepts, and helping people make their docs easier to read. At some point I was joking I am a calendar engineer. Coding in Google Calendar and in Notion, because that’s what I was doing. In the last 2 years I wrote more documents than code. And I didn’t just write, I made sure we improve the process. Make it easy to use, maintain, and make it part of the day to day work.

But then each time I wanted to take my learnings and publish them I got completely blocked.

My writer impostor came in a lot of shapes and forms. I am going to smash each one so I can come back here and read this each time I am blocked again.

👵 (Seniority) Expectations

It is expected from me to produce only polished out content. Since I have 15+ years of professional experience I had enough of time to make mistakes. Now I am supposed to know how to write and how to do things right.

I mean. Seriously. It’s 2023 and I do not want to add to the unhealthy culture of unrealistic expectations space. I’d like to embrace learning above perfection, discussion above being right. I’d like to be a model of sharing learnings, failures and struggles. And sharing my journey as a whole. We have enough of polished Instagram accounts sharing just a curated cut from life. I don’t want to build anything like that.

♻️ Recycling

I thought what I learned is a compilation of what other people shared. And so I just read it, remixed it and simply applied to my situation. In my head I haven’t figured anything myself and the content was already there. But. Remixing and applying are in fact the things making my situation unique. Someone else might be searching for the same thing. Or part of my experience might be realatable. If there is not one article that helped me but a combination of many things. Well, that’s good enough content. People don’t complain a DJ has just remixed songs from other people if they enjoy the compilation.

✨ Other people have it all figured out ✨

There are times where I just feel like everyone else already knows all the stuff I am doing. And then I hear Brene Brown talking with James Clear about how “you write the books you’d actually want to read”. This is exactly what I got all wrong for a very long time. I have a very high opinion of how other people operate and I try to live up to those standards. And how it usually works is they go through something for the first time and after it worked they look back and try to figure why it worked. Or they listen to a podcast and everything falls into the right place. That’s how they know why something worked.

🤦‍♀️ Mistake fallacy

If I make a mistake people will think less of me / they will not think I am professional enough. This is some kind of a blast from the past vibe. If I make a mistake I will fix it. I can update the post, share I learned a new thing or remove it. In most cases nobody will even care if I made a mistake and they will not care enough to tell me. So someone reaching out to me to tell me about it is already a success.

🌚 Anecdata / my experiences are invalid

If I had to deal with something just once I feel this is not enough experience / evidence. There is nothing that can actually make an experience invalid. This is just a stupid argument and I am not even going to discuss it with myself.

So here I am done with the committment to actually write about the journey. And I am committing to myself to finally write about my three burnouts and how I got through them as a next step. PS. Of course I started writing my blog in 2023 by buying a new domain 😂