Struggles with believing in myself

A new month, a new IndieWeb Carnival topic!

This month Zinzy Waleson Geene invites us to write about belief:

The theme is belief

It’s an open theme, one that I hope will inspire you to share whatever pops into your head when you think about it. A few prompts to merely inspire you:

• What is something you can’t know, but that you believe?
• What’s something you wish you could unbelieve?
• How do you relate to the word“belief”?

The prompts point towards religious or other supernatural beliefs but I don’t have a lot of things to say about them.

So I’m using my artistic freedoms as a blogger and write about another type of belief: believing in myself, self-confidence and the monster under the bed - impostor syndrome.

If you want to join this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, write a blog post in your own blog about the topic and send it to Zinzy, following the guidelines in the blog post linked above.

I’ve lost my self-confidence

Last almost five years, ever since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic have been rough. When the pandemic hit, I had a really nice job that I was very good at as a developer advocate. Then the pandemic pulled the rug from under my feet and things have gone downhill ever since.

A big part of my job was meeting developers: organizing and participating in events both internally and externally, speaking in meetups and conferences, having lunches and so on. All of that become pretty much impossible during the pandemic so I spent a good couple of years stressing out about that to the point of burning out once again. Then as the pandemic started easing out a bit in 2022, I moved to Berlin for a fresh start but that didn’t work out. Then I moved back home, started another job and that ended less than a year later in not so great terms.

Having been mostly unemployed for over a year, I’m bombarded with rejection and failures. Normally, I would be quite okay with dealing with them as I’ve always been quite ambitious which inevitably leads to a lot of rejections. But now, I have no clue how to dig myself out of this hole. I hate when that control and direction is lost.

And every passing month full of rejections hammers the self-confidence. I know I have things I’m good at: building engaging communities, teaching programming, public speaking, event organizing and writing, I keep feeling like none of my skills are a match to the business needs.

This year, there were three exceptionally well matching jobs among all the jobs I applied to. Those I got really excited about, felt that I would be a perfect match given my skills and my past experience. Only to not even be invited to an interview to any of them. Each one a direct blow to the stomach.

The worst part is that I don’t even know anymore what it is that I could do. If a friend would have asked me in 2019 what I want to do and what I aim for, I would have had a great list of things to mention. And while none of them have changed in the past ~5 years, right now my answer would be “I don’t even know anymore”.

In 2025, I want to rediscover that passion, ambition and self-confidence I once had. I just don’t know how.

Life-long impostor syndrome

I’ve suffered from an impostor syndrome ever since I was in probably 8th grade (about 15 years old) or so. It’s always been there, causing havoc but I’ve managed to keep it in bay for most of the part. Despite its nasty whispers in my ear, I’ve kept pushing and I’ve applied to cool stuff and have achieved quite a nice collection of life memories: living and working in Silicon Valley, becoming a public speaker, running multiple successful developer communities and working multiple dream jobs.

Still, it’s been there.

Last summer, I was pondering about this one day and I got a bit of revelation. I realised one possible source of where that impostor feeling stemmed from.

Ever since I was a kid, I was good at school. Like an almost straight-A top student. I loved school and learning too.

But the adults in my life kept telling me the same story month after month, year after year: “You might do well now but just wait until you go to high school/university/work life and you need to work harder to manage”. What my mind picked up every time was: “Your natural talent you’re relying on now is going to run out soon, you’re just lucky you survived this year.”

What they didn’t see and as a result, neither did I, was all the hard work I was doing and effective learning strategies I kept using because that day never seemed to arrive. I kept doing well in high school and university and in the work life. But I was always afraid that any day now, they’ll notice I’m not that good and I’ll fail.

I guess I could tell them now: congratulations, you were finally right.

Over the years, I’ve applied many tactics to fighting the impostor inside me, including building in public. None of them have really helped me silence it or get rid of it though. But I’m trying to at least put the burden on someone else’s shoulders by being as open as possible about what I can do and let them make the decision if that’s enough or not.

One effect of the impostor syndrome has had on me for years is that I feel like every job I’ve held and every project I’ve done, I’ve felt like I’m barely above the water, just barely escaping the moment when someone realizes what a grave mistake they’ve made and kicking me out.

Taking credit in community work is hard

One thing I’ve noticed over the years I’ve built communities is that people are very easily giving credit for community work to the person whose face they see the most. I think it’s very unfair and unhealthy. I often get credited for the stuff I’ve been involved in, even when the main important work has been done by someone else and I always fight back to try to make sure the people without whom things wouldn’t happen, get their credit.

In my line of work (and hobbies), this is almost always the case. As a community builder, I can impact things and I can facilitate an environment where people can do their best work but it’s still them who do it. So when someone succeeds, it’s to their credit, not mine.

Business world and job market is all about boasting who has the most credit so it feels so off-putting to participate in any of that. Most of my work that I’ve done in community positions has been a supporting role, impossible to extract the impact of just the community work.

Hire me, maybe?

With this brilliant pitch, maybe someone wants to hire me in Finland to build community. If that someone is you, get in touch and let’s talk! My contact info is in /contact. You can also see some of my skills in /work.