The wasted and the loser things, the broken and abused things, all these small things. The treasured and sacred things, the lost and the forsaken things… Small Things The Audreys
I remember when I first encountered the term “impostor syndrome”. I had accepted a role where it was my job to assess the cultural readiness of a community managed organisation as they prepared to embed a peer workforce. A peer worker and mental health advocate, this was the first time I had been recruited to a senior leadership position. In my first week, I was treated like a rock star, which completely shocked me. I was this shiny new thing that everyone was excited about. During one introductory conversation, the senior psychologist on our team, impressed at whatever it was that had just transpired in conversation, looked expectantly at me and asked, “what was the focus of your PhD?”
Embarrassed, I stumbled for half a second and averted my eyes, not wanting to see what might be reflected in his gaze as I delivered my response.
“I’m still trying to complete my undergraduate degree.”
Later that afternoon, I confessed my feelings of being miscast to a colleague on the very small team I had been embedded in. Her response was kind but misguided.
“You’re just struggling with impostor syndrome. We all feel that.”
I had spent the majority of the past 20 years desperately trying to prove on paper what had amounted to almost three degrees worth of accumulated multi-disciplinary academic study. I had almost completely exhausted my government allocated student loan limit. Every time I had come close to subject completion in any given semester, I had ended up in hospital, the legacy of a 15-year battle with chronic suicidal ideation, a lifetime of amassed complex trauma and arising psychosocial disability snapping at my heels. But that I had a head full of knowledge which could not be attested to by any post nominal conferment was only part of the problem.
Arts and leadership had always intertwined throughout my adolescence. A singer first, cultivating a hidden interest in writing before studies in theatre and later voice at university, I had also been involved in student leadership and had dedicated my youth to Girl Guides in my small town on the south coast of NSW. It was almost unavoidable that the confidence I displayed as I mastered the art of crafting my voice would draw the kind of attention that people would look up to in admiration.
I was ridiculed in the school playground, kids vocalising dramatised cadenzas as I passed by, but my music teachers would buoy my confidence and so I persisted. Performing one afternoon at an arts assembly, I left the stage with a sense of crescendo but as the applause began to die down, I could hear the latent booing from students until it was silenced by supervising teacher death stares. I retreated into the wings and fought back tears. As the dance troupe took their places on the stage while the MC tried to redirect the audience’s attention, one of the most popular girls in my year, clad in her black leotard and wispy golden tutu pulled me aside. Julie looked squarely into my widened eyes and whispered fiercely to me:
“You are the bravest person I know. I dance in a troupe, as part of a group where I can hide but you go out there and trust your voice all on your own. Never stop doing what you do. You inspire me.”
These early moments as an emerging artist and young leader collapsed in on themselves in late adolescence not long after my entry into university. My world was suddenly shattered by psychiatric diagnostic criteria and the intervening space of silence was amplified by compound sanist narratives. A life once full of promise was now regarded as futile, less than ordinary, even a source of concern as a shroud of life-limiting narratives were adopted by many, and a deep sense of failure, powerlessness and shame emerged.
“We’re not making any special concessions for you. Even if you are in hospital or dulled down by medications you don’t need due to misdiagnoses no-one will be willing to revisit until you are in your 40s. You are expected to earn your place in this world like everyone else.”
During the first lockdown in 2020, while the world was sleeping, in my own little corner, in my own little world, I dreamed. I wrote. Testing the range of my voice, I began to sing again. The degenerative deafness discovered at 16, had certainly taken a toll, with hearing aids useless to reconcile how I received and created sound. In the silence I determined to rely not on sound, but on resonance. I began to apply for work that aligned with my unarticulated education and aspirations. I began to pitch creative ideas. I didn’t care when rejections dropped into my inbox. I wanted a seat at the table, so I was determined to fashion one unique to my desires for the tables I hoped to pull it up to.
At a storytelling event I was to produce later in that year, our invited guest speaker dropped an Anais Nin quote into his speech that still reverberates through the powerlessness that had pervaded my life for more than 20 years.
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Deeper wrestling with this truth in relation to lived experience and disability arts leadership led from there into the office of the colleague who introduced me to the concept of impostor syndrome, and further into reflection on what creates limits and silence. In learning to harness this style of tenacity, I continued to find my way to tables that began to repeatedly affirm hope I had dared not believe were possible of exhuming from the rubble. I realised this journey could no longer be dismissed as a fluke, but I still felt unworthy.
In 2022, I was invited to become a contributor to the national mental health reform priorities. I now contribute consumer and lived experienced leadership perspectives in conversations that directly inform parliamentary considerations. I devised and contributed to lived experience-led arts-projects. I became immersed in on-the-job self-taught lessons in disability arts management, holding the line of artistic integrity against unwanted and unbidden external agendas. The journey across the past three years has led to publications, podcasting, acting, singing, editing, producing, directing, project management, advocacy, policy development, supervision, and even consumer academic contributions. The gift of being part of the Sync Australia 2022 cohort was the recognition of tools I already possessed but didn’t know I was allowed to name, claim, or celebrate.
While I had wholeheartedly rejected the notion of impostor syndrome, the soul destroying sanism and ableism accrued from years of being relegated to a mental health system and its wider social narratives that undermined any true hope of recovery was also silencing my ability to accept other’s recognition of what I have always naturally brought to any table I have found myself seated at. And herein lies the intersectional danger of adding the false dichotomy of impostor syndrome to the mix.
The awe and flailing I experienced as my work continued to be recognised as on par with professional actors, writers, theatre-makers, advocates, and leaders in a world still highly governed by “keep up or get out” principles, was a product of not internalized ableism, but rather is due to assumptions of equality over equity. The adaptive nature of our subject matter expertise, our neurodivergence, and our heightened ability to see beyond traditional pathways means that we do pick it up or even work it out for ourselves along the way, which then informs our own unique leadership styles. Cultures that demand productivity over workplace and social cohesion, ultimately silence the inclusivity they would otherwise argue that they champion.
People are still a largely unaware of what it is to navigate the environmental and attitudinal barriers that stand in our way sometimes on a daily or even moment-by-moment basis, to engage fully in our community as disabled and lived experience artists and leaders. If we are going to be serious about the social model of disability in the current Australian sociopolitical landscape, we must desist from activating politically correct practices spruiking statistical representations of diversity and instead focus on dismantling widely adopted cultural myths and outdated theories that continue to silence.
Voices brave enough to highlight discrimination, sometimes even through expressions of distress experienced as threat in the arising frequencies are an opportunity to attune ourselves not to the sound but the resonance.
When is an expression of resistance evidence of an individual failing society and where might it be an invitation to examine further dismantling structural inequity in leadership contexts?
This is a question that hums through my mind and calcifying inner ear bones. I may not have the answers, but I finally understand that the product of sitting with this discomfort has become a calling that I can no longer hide from or push against. I may not hear what others hear but the uniqueness of what I do hear, leads me to pepper my worlds with curious questions. And what I receive in feedback, confirmation and even defensiveness keeps me attentive to the humbling truth that in learning to trust the feeling of the frequencies, we might truly be able find harmonies that modulate dissonance to bliss.
Written on ancestral First Nations lands. I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. Sovereignty was never ceded. Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.
![many mixed media symbol-images are organized in the structure of a grid. From left to right there is a light green abstract looped flower, an orange carrot-like shape surrounded by deep blue and purple. The head of a water spray jug that is green and pink with a yellow and black background. Many blue J hooks dance atop an orange background. A red partial circle sits next to a bright mint green. A close-up of a clock’s numbers 12, 1, 2 and 3 in graphite. A mess of pink, cream, and orange blobs connect and crash into each other. The top of an exaggerated yellow question mark with a black scribbled background. An abstract chubby snake that is pink and muted orange with purple, sticks its black tongue out surrounded by bright lime green background. A close-up of a purple, blue, black, and cream doodle-stylised eye with long lashes and reddened white space. A big pink bubble letter H is outlined in black with a yellow background. A close-up of a blue water bottle with cream and purple wings against a black background. From the bottom right corner spreading across and up is red scribbles making their way into each individual image.]](https://syncleadership.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Picture-1.png)
