This wasn't the f***ing plan...
Do you really think I want to be doing this? Writing blogs about my feelings, and putting the most uncomfortable parts of myself on a public page for anyone to read? Being the guy who goes online and lays out the truth of not having a a job, a car, or income, and debt that doesn't care about your dreams and calling it content?
Of course thats the plan for NOW... but this was never in the cards....
The plan was a career in action sports; athletic development and supporting the next generation of action sports, ans making a name for myself in a world I've belonged to since I was 14 years old....
Instead I'm here, farther from that truth than I've ever been, or at least that's what it feels like on the days when the weight of everything sits directly on my chest and refuses to move. What is wrong with me... what did I do wrong to end up here in this space?
I don't always know what I feel anymore, and that's not a figure of speech. It's a genuine disorientation that lives in me this inability to trust my own emotional read on a situation because, for as long as I can remember, someone else has been overwriting it.
"That's not what happened" Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize my memory was no longer functioning "You're too sensitive" Then are you suggesting I should be numb? "I don't remember saying that" Then let me be your reminder... "Why can't you just let it go?" Because your actions affected me directly?
You hear these phrases enough times, by enough people, starting early enough in life, and your own perception starts to feel unreliable.
Like a compass that's been near a magnet too long, you know it's supposed to point somewhere true, you're just not sure it does anymore...
I was gaslit into doubting my own reality so many times, that I stopped being sure which feelings were mine and which ones were assigned to me. The mask doesn't come off easily when wearing it has kept you safe your whole life.
I know this pattern and I learned it watching my father. The way a situation could shift, reality bending around whoever needed it to bend, and somehow I'd end up holding responsibility for something I didn't cause. I'd bring something up, it wouldn't land, the problem would happen anyway, I'd reference the warning..."I don't remember that", Doubt would move in, quiet and certain....
"Maybe I imagined it...maybe I'm the problem....maybe I'm asking too much from people who are doing their best"
Here's what I've come to understand about that cycle: It doesn't matter whether the forgetting is intentional or not, whether it's deliberate rewriting or genuine absence of memory, the impact is identical.
You are left alone with a reality that no one else will confirm and you're left questioning your own mind, editing your own perception to keep the peace. That's not a you problem, that's what happens to anyone inside that cycle long enough.
I am sick of my own perception being overwritten by someone else's perspective. I am sick of being fucked both ways. Defend yourself and you're difficult, stay quiet and the problem compounds. I am sick of being the most organized person in a room full of people who benefit from the disorganization, and then looking around confused when the chaos lands on me. I am sick of being the problem in situations I warned about.
I am also tired, and its not the tired that sleep fixes. It's a kind of tired that lives in the nervous system and in the muscles that won't release. It's in the body that has been bracing against something for so long, it forgot what it felt like to just stand without holding on.
And underneath all of it.... Guilt. And shame.
Guilt for wanting more than a paycheck and for choosing a creative path in a world that only values creativity once it generates income. For building something that my mom and my wife read while the debt sits quietly in the corner waiting for me to acknowledge it.
Shame for the gap between who I know I am and where I currently stand, for every step forward that somehow lands out of sequence with how the rest of the world moves, for needing more time than other people seem to need to get to the same place. Sorry for wanting more out of life than a routine that slowly hollows me out. I'm not actually sorry. But I've been made to feel like I should be.
Here is what The Imposter actually is:
The Imposter is what happens to a person who is exactly who they say they are in a world that keeps telling them that person isn't possible.
You're too smart for your own good. The paths you take lead nowhere. Following your dreams is a fantasy we tell ourselves to sleep. Heard long enough, the voice stops coming from outside. It moves in, sets up shop, and starts sounding like your own thoughts. That's the real imposter, not me pretending to be something I'm not.
I am a creative mind in a world that doesn't value creativity unless it pays the bills. I am a perceptive person in a world that finds perception inconvenient. I am a man who sees patterns clearly, tracks conversations accurately, and notices things people would rather go unnoticed and has spent his entire life being made to feel like that's a problem. It was never a problem. It was always a threat to people who needed the dynamic to stay exactly as it was.
I don't have it figured out. I don't know exactly how this becomes a career or when the debt gets paid or what the path looks like from here to where I'm trying to go. I do know this: the voice that tells me I'm the imposter isn't mine. I know what mine sounds like. It sounds like a 14 year old kid, wrist injured, finishing the season anyway. It sounds like a man loading a mountain bike onto a bus at 5am to go stand on a road in the Columbia Gorge because he belongs in that world and he knows it. It sounds like this. Whatever this is. It's real. And it's mine.
- MR. BONEZ