The Imposter Syndrome is Alive and Well

Impostor syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. Despite external evidence of their competence, those with the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

-Wikipedia

The last presenter for day two of the recent Write the Docs conference was Heidi Waterhouse speaking on "Success is More Than Not Failing." She wasn't the only one at the event to discuss impostor syndrome, but she's the only one who talked about it that made it into my notes.

Up until the conference, not only did I think I was the only one suffering from the malady, but I didn't even know it had a name.

Fortunately, the Wikipedia article says it's not so much a mental disorder but rather "an ingrained personality trait." Great, but why me?

Or should the question be "why technical writers?"

I can't speak for anyone else, but more often than not in my career, I've been the lone wolf writer in a room full of software developers and network engineers. It's easy (for me, at least) to feel like an uneducated idiot when rubbing elbows with people half my age and even younger who write complicated lines of code for highly sophisticated and competitive products like most people write out shopping lists.

Even on those very few occasions when I've worked with groups of other writers, our skill sets for so diverse that there was no easy basis for comparison so again, I felt like the lone wolf in search of my pack.

Interestingly enough, even software developers suffer from impostor syndrome. I never realized that...

Pair-programming can be particularly stressful but also writing open-source software and activities which push you into being genuine.

While Waterhouse's presentation and the Write the Docs conference was reassuring, it also presented challenges that actually heightened my particular "syndrome." The company handed over a sizable chunk of change for me to go to Write the Docs and they're entitled to some return on that investment.

I didn't take all those notes just for my personal edification. My outfit is in the process of not just changing documentation platforms but reconstructing the way we think of things like information and collaboration.

I'm content to sit at my desk and, having worked with the relevant developers, create content for customer consumption, but what happens when I start making suggestions, particularly to department heads, about changing our collective documentation process?

Actually, I've already done that since I spearheaded the effort to change how we document our product, but I learned things at the conference that had never occurred to me before and that I think would be valuable additions/changes to what we do and how we think. I'm not suggesting we change horses in midstream, but I think we'd get a lot more mileage out of re-equipping that horse and reorganizing the riders.

I know there were a number of practical suggestions on how to manage impostor syndrome made at the conference that didn't make it into my notes. However, advice on the Internet is cheap and startupbros.com lists "21 Ways to Overcome Impostor Syndrome." Looks like I've got some reading to do.

More than a week has passed since the end of the conference, and I've created some mental distance between me and that experience. This is making it easier to review my notes, but now I need to organize them and cobble together some sort of presentation, then schedule it, and then give it to a specific audience.

I can't weasel out the commitment because I've already told my boss that's what I'm going to do.

I suppose this blog post would be more meaningful if I had already done all that and successfully came out the other side, but blogging is part of how I process information so it's more cognitively and emotionally manageable.

Put another way, part of blogging for me is managing the "impostor" inside and encouraging that competent writer to acknowledge himself. This is how I prepare myself to go into "battle."

I keep asking myself, "I wonder if any other people in my field feel this way," which is an insane question since the conference already answered that query with an abundant, "Yes!"

The syndrome is alive and well...so far.

The Lone Wolf Writer in Context

At the recent Write the Docs conference, I had the opportunity to briefly speak with one of the keynotes, the gracious Marcia Riefer Johnston. I wanted to thank her both for her wonderful presentation and for being of a "similar age" to me. Not having any idea about what to expect, I imagined I'd be the oldest person attending, probably by decades.

Fortunately, the level of diversity present at the conference included a wide age range, so I didn't feel terribly anachronistic.

I also had an opportunity to share with Marcia something of my background and current working circumstances. In most places I've worked (such as HP, Micron, and the little-known EmergeCore), including my present job, I've been the "Lone Wolf" technical writer, the only person who does exactly what I do in the shop. While that makes me unique, it can also be kind of lonely. From developers, to operations, to support, to testing, to management, no one completely understands the nature of my process or my pain points.

The flip side is without access to a community of technical writers, I don't know what's supposed to be "normal".

All that changed, at least in potential, when Marcia mentioned the Society for Technical Communication (STC) and specifically the Special Interest Group (SIG) Lone Writer (personally, I prefer "Lone Wolf Writer" but I guess you can't have everything).

I'm still exploring STC and Lone Writer online, but even the possibility of belonging to a larger group of people like me, and particularly a group of "Lone Wolves," is exciting.

In addition, I'm already beginning to dialog at the new Write the Docs Forum. I know that at the conference, we were all strongly encouraged to organize meetups within our communities, but knowing so little about the technical documentation community, either locally or globally, makes that idea seem incredibly intimidating at present.

I think I'll start out with my contacts being virtual before summoning the chutzpah to make them material.

I'm still sorting through all of the notes I took during the conference in order to develop a meaningful summary to present to the support manager and staff, but in order to flesh out any changes I'm going to propose to their team and the other related departments, I'll also need to acquire a sense of who I am among my community of peers, even if they are peers at a distance.

Then I can suggest how to better develop and manage our documentation process and how we conceive of information. Joining STC and the Lone Writer SIG will make me a "Lone Wolf" among many "Lone Wolves," and as a technical writer within the larger technical writing community, I'll become a Lone Wolf Writer who has finally found a context.

Oh man, I've really ignored this place, Part 2

I posted Part 1 on December 3, 2013 and I've just discovered (re-discovered) that I haven't posted here since January 17, 2014. That's sixteen months of neglect.

To be fair, I've devoted my time to other blogging venues in the non-technical realm, for the most part, so it's not like I have given up blogging altogether.

The reason I'm (again) resurrecting "A Million Chimpanzees" is I need a place to specifically chronicle my adventures at the recent Write the Docs conference in Portland, Oregon.

Although my efforts to use this blogspot to describe my progress (or lack thereof) in learning some of the basics of programming hasn't worked out (read: "abject failure"), this is the closest thing I have to a technical blog, so it seems fitting that I drag the chimps out of their long slumber and back into the world for the purpose of visiting my first love and my career: technical writing.

I've almost always been the Lone Wolf writer in whatever job I've had writing. The exception was when I worked for a group that contracted with HP and each of us was paid only "billable hours," rather than having what I'd consider a steady income as the in-house documentarian.

Even then, we writers represented such a diverse collection of skill sets, that from my point of view, we weren't particularly alike at all.

The perception of being alone as a technical writer changed for me last Monday and Tuesday as I attended this conference. I really didn't know what to expect. I've already commented on my experience somewhat in Part One and Part Two of a different blog, however the focus wasn't specifically what I learned as a writer, nor is that venue particularly "friendly" or at least "relate-able" to other technical writers.

So here I am.

Part of why I'm writing this is to process all of the raw notes I took during the two-day conference. However, I also want to hone my focus on my own progress as a writer with an eye on initiating significant change in my workplace and among other teams.

Like I said, I'm used to being a Lone Wolf, but I realized at the conference that's got to change in order for not only me to advance as a writer, but for my company to benefit from what I've learned and to improve the way we think of documentation and information.

Unfortunately, along with many insights, I brought a raging headache back with me from Portland, so today's blog post is going to be short. As I work my way through my notes and get more organized, so will my rendition of the history of the 3rd annual Write the Docs conference.

Please stand by.