Link to Part 4

Over the years my imposter syndrome only got worse. It’s still awful, in fact.

Between 2018 and 2024 – with a couple-year break thanks to Covid – I attended a local writing meetup, and much like the aforementioned polyamory meetup I had a lot of fun writing in a social setting. I enjoyed the small community of leftist intellectuals I found there, and I always felt welcomed and accepted with no compulsion to prove myself to those in attendance. In fact, the default respect I received from my fellow attendees usually felt misguided or even flat-out wrong.

I didn’t spend every minute of the entire two-and-a-half-hour meetup writing; there were days when I just couldn’t make the words happen. There were days when I was preoccupied with something else and figured since no one could see my screen it didn’t matter if I spent the whole session focused on whatever it was. And I’m sure there were days when I spent much of the meetup sexting women, back when women found me hot and felt compelled to say so. But at least 80% of those meetups were spent being very productive.

That said, to some extent I still never felt like I was truly a part of the group. Many of the attendees were published authors, and those who weren’t were almost certainly better writers than I. I’ve never read any of their work and I have nothing on which to base that assessment, but certainly their writing is way better than my own. I mean, just look at them, in their business-casual attire, sipping their lattes carrying their top-of-the-line laptops and tablets in designer bags. They’ve clearly got it together so much better than I do. I’m sure these people weren’t asked to give up their identities, their lives, their dreams! Or if they were, I’m guessing they had sufficient feelings of self-worth to be like “Nah.”

Okay, that’s obviously disingenuous. I think I’m a decent writer. I’m sure all of the people who attended the meetup are too, but it’s certainly possible that any one of them might read something I wrote and tell me it’s fantastic. Perhaps they’d have constructive criticism to offer. But I doubt any of them would read a piece of my writing and condemn it as irredeemable dreck. Even if they were inclined to lie in order to spare my feelings, I doubt they’d even think it’s irredeemable dreck. Still, it’s hard for me to put my work out there, to offer it up for scrutiny. Perhaps it’s my drive for perfectionism that inhibits me. Perhaps it’s Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria; I’m told those two things go hand in hand.

I am certainly a perfectionist. And I definitely exhibit signs of Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, also known as RSD. But I can think of another possible reason why I seldom let others read or otherwise consume my work. To fully explore it, we’ve got to go way the hell back to the 1980s.

As a child, I had a vivid imagination. Accordingly, I was obsessed with creative pursuits. I wrote short stories. I drew pictures and even very basic comics. I sculpted figurines. I drew rudimentary cartoons on the edges of notepad pages and animated them by flipping through the pages with my hand. I can’t say that I was especially talented with regard to any of these activities, but more than one of my teachers used adjectives like “industrious”, “inventive”, and “clever” to describe my talents. Of my very primitive attempts at animation, my very impressed sixth grade teacher told me I could be the next Walt Disney. Eleven-year-old Jack thought that was very sweet of her to say, but didn’t believe it for a minute. I mean, that’s nice and all, but get real. I knew I didn’t have what it took to create anywhere near that level, much less on it.

But what if I’d just accepted the compliment? What if I’d taken heed of the fact that she saw something in me, even if it was just the tenacity to keep trying? If there had been more people in my life who truly encouraged these frivolous pursuits I enjoyed, maybe I could have believed in my talents enough to do something with them. Maybe something I created – a novel, a painting, a low-budget film – would matter to someone somewhere. Maybe they’d remember my name as the guy who made that thing they like. I didn’t necessarily want to be rich and famous, though I’ll admit that living in financial comfort sounds really good right now. I just wanted to make a difference. I wanted to have something to show for my existence.

My parents were generally supportive, but no matter what creative activity I got excited about, they always said the same thing: “You’ll need something to fall back on.” Bear in mind that I wasn’t in my twenties at the time. I wasn’t even in my late teens. There was no impending danger that I was going to squander my adult years making Tijuana Bibles or engage in some other dumbass flight of fancy. No, I was a child, an adolescent, and a young teenager when this advice was doled out.

In the 1980s it was considerably more difficult to produce and distribute media. If you wanted to shoot a movie, you had to get a real movie camera and pay for film or, theoretically, buy or borrow a Camcorder, shoot the movie on videotape, and accept that it wouldn’t look like a “real movie”. You couldn’t edit your movie on a phone – such a suggestion would have made no sense circa 1987 – and rather than uploading it to YouTube, the closest the typical amateur filmmaker came to distribution back then might have been inviting friends over to watch it projected on a wall screen, or perhaps on the family VCR.

Writing was probably the easiest of the aforementioned creative pursuits to share with an audience, but back then even that was more difficult than it is now. One could certainly write or type something on paper – a novella, a comic, a magazine – and then make copies and give them away or even sell them. But the distribution channels available in 2025 were difficult if not impossible to imagine when I was a kid. Today one might publish their writing on a blog, or produce a digital work and make it available for free or for pay, either as a downloadable .pdf or through an e-reader app.

Given the limitations of the era in which I grew up, as well as the competitive and potentially unstable nature of such pursuits, I understand why my parents cautioned me against trying to pursue a career in a creative field. I know that it was intended to benefit me in the long-term; I certainly could have tried to write comics or make short animated features, and it’s possible that I could have succeeded. But if I was also a banker, a certified public accountant, or an attorney I’d have had financial security either way. It’s good advice, honestly. But back then what I heard was “You’re never going to make a living that way”, “You’re not good enough to be successful doing that”, or “We will not support you”. Eventually it pretty much killed my passion.

Decades later, it is abundantly clear that when a young child develops an interest, their parent does not need to warn them that said interest may someday preclude them from paying their rent. You don’t need to tell a five-year-old that collecting rocks doesn’t look good on a resume or a college application. You don’t need to tell an eight-year-old about the long-term financial implications of being super into taekwondo. You don’t need to tell an eleven-year-old that hula hooping isn’t a career. Of course it’s not a fucking career.

Perhaps those examples are bad ones. Taekwondo, hula hooping, and rock collecting are certainly fun activities for kids – perhaps less so in the era of Minecraft, media on demand, and instant gratification than they were thirty years ago – but I don’t see them as creative pursuits along the lines of art, music, or dance. I might be wrong about that, but either way the point is still valid: Don’t give a young child – or an older child, or an adult, for that matter – a reason not to do the things they enjoy. When my daughter expressed at age five an interest in ballet and tap, we didn’t say “Okay, but it’s a very competitive field and we’d hate for you to be disappointed if you don’t become an international superstar.” When she expressed an interest in softball and soccer, we didn’t say “Okay, but there’s no way in hell we are going to drive you to tournaments all over the state if you’re still doing this as a teenager.” We just filled out the forms, paid the fees, and let her be a kid.

I wish my parents had approached it the same way.

Up next: The Circle of Life, wherein I find myself at a crossroads. Not the crossroads I’m currently at. A different one.