Tuesday Thoughts on Singleness and Imposter Syndrome

Image by Pawel Czerwinski via Unsplash

There are some things nobody really talks about. And I don’t mean the random and largely unimportant things like having a favorite burner on the stove, or always putting the same sock on first, or secretly being afraid that you’ll trip on concrete and knock your front teeth out.

I mean things like how we all feel inadequate, and how hard it is to make friends as an adult, and how many times we’re blindsided by an idea or realization that we hadn’t ever seen, somehow. We don’t usually talk about these things.

While hanging up the laundry on my sturdy wooden clothes rack tonight (find a similar one here), I got to thinking about being single and thirty-five, and how unexpected it’s been, somehow. Not the part about being single so much, although twenty-year-old-me certainly didn’t expect herself to be still single at thirty-five. But what it’s been like, that’s been unexpected.

35. The big three five.

No big deal, I thought. Another birthday. Except that for some reason I really didn’t feel like celebrating this one. So much so, I considered hiding it, not mentioning it to anyone, and hoping nobody remembered to send cards. (I’m almost embarrassed to admit how very much I wanted to avoid it.)

Tonight, in the midst of the rhythmic movement of hanging clothes, I found some ideas about why.

1. Myth: If you’re single and don’t want to be, it’s all your fault and there’s something wrong with you that you aren’t willing to fix.
   There’s a LOT of books, Instagram accounts, podcasts, and “dating coaches” perpetuating this idea. Just follow this process, buy this program, do these four things, change this attitude, and you will have good men falling over themselves to date you, they promise.
   Swallowing this idea has tripped me up, stomped my ribs, and left me gasping in the dust. And the vicious thing is, there is just enough truth in the idea to make it seem all true. For many of us, there really are areas that we need to work on in order to become “marriageable”. Where I got tripped up was the notion that I could somehow earn a relationship and that if I didn’t get what I wanted, it was a reflection on my own worth. Which becomes a vicious cycle wherein passing time constantly and mockingly affirms my lack.
   I’m still working through this one. No wise words of wisdom, no neatly wrapped package of ideas on how to work through this belief and come out the other side happy and secure.

2. “Advanced Maternal Age”. Thirty-five is the arbitrary age at which all pregnancies become automatically “high risk” because of the mother is now officially old. When I turned thirty, I grieved the fact that I will never birth a child in my twenties, like all my grade-school peers did (that’s right, every single one of them, except me). At thirty-five, I had to grieve the fact that I will never have a low-risk pregnancy, from a medical standpoint (I’m not getting into how I don’t agree with this, except to say that I don’t). And of course there is the increasing likelihood of never being able to have a biological child, which is also an unexpectedly heavy grief.

3. The myth of the expected career timeline. I’ve had an interesting and varied career, working in more areas than the average nurse, and gaining some unique skill and knowledge combinations, even including some overseas work. However, this jill-of-all-trades approach means that I feel like I’m barely getting started when my younger peers are often highly skilled in their niche. If I’m not careful, I will start to feel like an absolute failure. But the reality is…

4. Trauma affects one’s ability to learn and take risks. For almost five years. I stayed in a job that required far less of me than I was actually capable of. It took that long for me to work through several major traumatic events and regain my belief in my own ability to learn and tolerate risk. I wish it wasn’t this way, of course, and I wish I had been able to move on from it sooner. But I’m learning to have compassion and kindness towards myself, and to delight in the joy of learning as it’s returning.

5. The high cost of caring about excellence. Closely connected to the previous points. Imposter syndrome has been a near-constant companion all of my adult life, and probably even before. Imposter syndrome constantly whispers in my ear that I’m not REALLY good at this, I’ve just somehow fooled people into thinking that I am. Imposter syndrome says that I shouldn’t take risks, because I will fail and then everyone will know that I’m a fraud. It’s taken years to realize that some level of imposter syndrome is normal for anyone who cares about excellence and doing their work well. Now, when it whispers that I’m a fraud who doesn’t know enough, I just remind myself that I care a lot about doing this well, and that there is always more I can and should learn, and allow the discomfort to drive continual improvement instead of keeping me stuck. At least, most of the time. Occasionally I need a friend to bring me back to a more balanced view.

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In Which I Talk About Money

I’m not quite sure how this happened… but grace and redemption are, for sure, part of the story.

My dad is a financial genius. He is a dedicated dairy farmer, so it’s not like he’s got a lucrative profession. But somehow, through thirty-plus years, there was always enough, even for the unrelenting medical bills (all but one of the family got chronic Lyme disease over a period of fifteen years, a grueling and expensive experience).

Unusual for that time and place, my parents openly discussed finances around us kids. We knew the kind of work and thought it took to manage a business with razor thin margins and high operating costs and absorbed many basic money principles just by overhearing discussions with accountants, consultants, and bankers.

Given that kind of foundation, you would think that “money stuff” would come easy for me. And for quite a few years, it seemed that it did. I had ten thousand in the bank when I enrolled in college, and I worked crazy hours all the way through to offset expenses as much as possible.  I collected impressive amounts of scholarship money, and graduated debt free. I thought, smugly, that my peers just didn’t have it quite as together. I felt sorry for them, without the advantages of a good solid Mennonite upbringing.

But then. I hit rock bottom, and in desperation, admitted that I couldn’t handle the emotional pain I’d been living with for decades.

Life fell apart. In the process of finally addressing unresolved trauma and abuse, I lost family relationships, friends, church, community, and my debt-free status.

It’s now over three years since the fateful day when I began to allow God to do the undoing and healing process. And of the many things I’ve learned in that time, perhaps the most unexpected has to do with finances.

My dad is a financial genius. The things he does, are intuitive. He loves to run his business account with cushion of a hundred dollars or less, but somehow he calculates so well that the debit card is never declined. And while he taught us kids a lot more than average, you can’t teach things that you can’t explain. It’s taken me a long time to understand some of what he was doing when he scribbled out an intricate and perfectly balanced budget on a sheet of lined notebook paper.

He taught me so much, and it’s been invaluable. One of the griefs that been hardest to grapple with, was realizing that he didn’t teach me enough. But one day, I stopped deluding myself, and looked the facts squarely in the face.

I had credit cards and had run a cumulative balance in the thousands for several years. Thanks to zero interest introductory offers, and low-cost balance transfers, it wasn’t costing me much. But the balance had stayed pretty much the same for months, and it seemed that I couldn’t make headway.

I finally admitted that I had a problem, and cautiously confessed these facts to a few trusted friends. Then I got serious about getting out of debt. Dave Ramsey’s videos, including the “Baby Steps” plan, filled in a few crucial pieces of practical knowledge that had been missing. I actually have a working budget, for the first time in my life. And the debt began to decrease. A hundred here, and five hundred there. Another balance transfer to keep from incurring interest.

Finally, I was down to the final thousand. Then the power steering went out on my car. The repair meant replacing the entire steering column and took out my emergency fund. The day after I put the car in the shop, the shutdown hit. My income abruptly dropped by more than half, with no emergency fund.

What happened next is sheer grace. A few days working in a farm store. A housecleaning job there. Babysitting. And generous, astounding, utterly unexpected financial gifts. A new client that is in all ways better than the ones I lost.

Two and half months later, and six weeks behind my carefully plotted schedule, that last thousand has been paid. My cumulative credit limit increased by approximately $1,500 (even during the pandemic skittishness), and my credit score topped 800 for the first time ever.

I’m less confident in my own abilities than perhaps I’ve ever been, and better equipped. And that, too, is grace.

Postscript: If you’d rather a book, one of the better known of Dave Ramsey’s books is The Total Money Makeover. (That is an affiliate link: If you use it, I get a few cents, and the cost to you stays the same.)