3 – The Chairman

So now that most of the foundation has been laid, regarding family structure and dynamics, we can start to move into who the Committee is made of. Also, I posted a cheat sheet for the family monikers titled 2.1 – Clarification due to some readers stating they were kind of lost. I apologize for that, telling your story without naming everyone is a bit difficult, and well, I am new to this version of writing. Most of my writing has been personal stuff or incident reports, etc. I will get better, I promise.

In the third grade, I was in G.A.T.E. (Gifted and Talented Education). The teachers would nominate kids for the annual Spelling Bee, and I was one of them that year. Most of the kids in the Bee were in my class, and I was a much better speller than a lot of them. I have always excelled at spelling and math, probably because they are very logical subjects, you’re either right or wrong. Anyway, I knew the level of words we would be asked to spell, so I practiced and practiced. Finally, the day of the Bee came, I was so excited! I couldn’t wait to show C&R how smart I was! Q didn’t bother showing up for any number of reasons. If my memory serves correctly, I believe there were about 25 kids to start. After the first round concluded, we were down to about 12-15, one of them being me.

Round two began without a few of the stronger spellers that I knew would be my competition, so I was feeling pretty good. The first couple kids went out, as the words got a little tougher. Now it’s my turn… I stand there, full of confidence, waiting for my word. The moderator obliges… “Mosquito”. I do the whole “use it in a sentence” bit, and I get ready to declare my victory over round two. I blurt out, M-I… I know, I already fucked up… Q-U-I-T-O, MISQUITO… WRONG! I was fucking wrecked, heart sunk. I knew it as soon as I said the follow-up pronunciation. It was over, I am dumb. I can’t spell, and I disappointed my parents. What a failure.

The walk to the car. I was balling, I KNEW HOW TO SPELL IT! I will never forget what R said to me to try to cheer me up, “don’t worry, I spell it M-U-S-K-I-T-O”, and I chuckled between the crocodile tears, but the damage had been done. This memory rings in my head when I look back on past “failures” and I believe it may have given birth to my sense of unworthiness, and later blossomed into the Imposter. The seed was sewn.

Between fifth grade and freshman year, I moved schools a few times. My parents moved in my sixth-grade year, so I left the school I had been attending basically my whole life and went to a completely different school with no one that I knew. After sixth grade, I went to middle school in Folsom, CA, but halfway through seventh grade, I switched again to a school in El Dorado Hills, CA. I was having issues with R and RJ at my mom’s house, so I decided to go live with Q and the family. I was new to the area, with no friends and switched halfway through the year. I wasn’t popular, I was struggling to find who I was. I tried the wrestling team, sucked, I tried just hanging out with different people, I dyed my hair green and grew it out. I was a mess, really. Then in eighth grade, Q picked up and moved to Tempe, AZ, and I followed.

Tempe was a culture shock. I had never been away from my mom for more than a couple days and now I was living in a different state with a different family. We weren’t crazy poor, but we weren’t exactly wearing new clothes and shoes. The middle school I went to was predominately Blacks and Hispanics with a huge gang problem. Most of the gangs at this age were what they called “Tagging Crews”, and mostly they vandalized things with spray paint. By this time, I had learned how to mesh into any group, and I started to fall into the wrong crowd. I wanted so badly to be in a tagging crew and worked on my tagging with markers and paper. To this day, I have never tagged with spray paint. I dressed the part, acted the part, but deep down, I knew that that person was not me. I didn’t like the “danger”, or to be out running the streets, I was a small-town boy from the mountains of Northern California. A lot of weird things happened in Arizona, but most of them were inconsequential to who I am today. The biggest thing I can remember is that I began to hate it there for a multitude of reasons and could not wait to finish the school year and move back to my mom’s in Cali.

When I finally did, right before my 13th birthday, my grandma picked me up from the airport because my mom was working. I was so happy to be back home. I was hanging out with my grandma Mabry (God, rest her soul), and my mom walked in the house, looked right at me and asked where her son was. Mind you, in the year I was gone, we didn’t have FaceTime or anything like that, so my mom had not seen that I had grown over 8 inches and put on almost 50lbs. So, the 5’4” 12 year old that she sent to Arizona was now a 6’ 220lb teenager, dressed like a cholo.

My mom enrolled me in High School, and I was able to make a couple friends in my neighborhood, one was older and had his license. Once school started, I rode with him and pretty much hung out with him most of the time. My HS was in the same town as the 7^th grade that I switched to, so I ended up meeting people that I knew from that year. Some of them are still my friends to this day. A lot of them were signed up for freshman football, so I did too. Again, trying to find where I fit in. I liked freshman football, but I wasn’t very good at it.

I chose not to play my sophomore year/Junior Varsity, instead I chose to get a job to save money for when I got my license. Because all my friends still played, they talked me into coming out for Varsity in my junior year. When I showed up, I was already behind the 8-ball because I did not play the year prior. I got better, I was fast and strong and loved playing defense, but I just wasn’t good enough to make first string. My senior year, I was getting better and better and really causing our offense to have to figure out how to deal with me, and I kept making it a point to the coaches that I deserved a spot on the starting defense. One day after practice, the head coach pulled me aside and told me that I would never make the starting defense because I didn’t play my JV year. Me, never missing an opportunity to ask questions, even if confrontational or semi-sarcastic, I replied “so it doesn’t matter how good I am, or how many of your O-lineman I beat, I will never be a starter?!” to which he confirmed his previous statement, saying “that is exactly correct.”

As you can imagine, I was heartbroken, pissed off, ready to throw in the towel and say, “FUCK IT!” But I confided in one of my close friends and we came to the conclusion that I was going to go out there everyday and be an absolute menace to the offense and try to make it to where they had to give me a spot. They did not, in two seasons, I was second string with minimal playing time, even when we were absolutely blowing out the other team. Although, I was seen as an integral part of our championship season, because I knew, and was told by our O-line, that I was tougher and harder to block than any opponent we played, so I made our line the best.

However, second string never gets recognition, second string might as well be tenth string, and half speed heroes at practice were a dime a dozen. I wasn’t special. But my two best friends at the time were. They were both all-stars on the field, like literally, they both made it to the All-Star team. Off the field, we were all inseparable. We pretty much always walked shoulder to shoulder, and one of our coaches remarked that we looked like a wall coming at him. From this, we became The Wall, each of us being 1/3 Wall. But I would never be like them, they had all the confidence that a star football player in high school would have, they got the ladies, and everything seemed to come easy for them. I was just “Gibby”, their funny brother from another mother.

I can see now, and maybe felt it a bit as it was happening, that I self-sabotaged A LOT. I think I did this, and sometimes still do, to lower expectations of me and avoiding misspelling “mosquito” again. My feeling of unworthiness was climbing.

It didn’t help that in my early years of high school, my best friend was one of the “hottest girls in school” and no matter what I did, I was friend-zoned in a MAJOR way. I get it, I was big and goofy and covered in acne, so of course she couldn’t date me… This was nothing new to me at this point, I had never been what the girls wanted, in fact, in the same year as the dreaded Spelling Bee mishap, I asked one of the cuter girls in my class to “check yes or no”, to which she replied “yes, but don’t tell anyone.” At the time, I had no idea what that meant, but looking back…OUCH!

At home, my mom had been dealing with RJ, again I won’t air out his personal business, but he was not an easy kid to raise. My mom was finally able to finish college/nursing school and went to work. R was always self-employed and self-motivated, he had to build a life for all four of us, and concentrate on his future for retirement, etc., so he worked all the time. Between my mom going to school and later work, RJ garnering most of the attention, and R working his ass off to give us a good life, I was sort of left to my own devices…again.

I rarely saw my parents in my high school years. My best friend in the world, more like the older brother I never had, got his license sophomore year, so we were gone all the time. When I got my license between sophomore and junior year, I basically only came home to sleep and change. When football practice was over, we would hang out at a gas station for hours, and on weekends we were out. House parties, parking lot parties, general hanging out, hitting up Jack-in-the-Box or Steve’s Pizza, we were nomads looking for somewhere to hang out and do what small town football players and their friends do. Eventually, mostly during the summer because we had a pool, a lot of the parties were held at my house, with my parents being there for most of them.

Even though I wasn’t home a lot, or didn’t really talk to my parents when I was, I was always very open with my mom. I would call to tell her where I was and would let her know if we left. We didn’t have cell phones yet, so she would page me, yes PAGE ME, and I would call back asap and let her know what I was doing. She knew we were probably drinking, but 99.9% of the time, we would have a DD or commit to staying wherever we started. Eventually, it was probably obvious that I was smoking marijuana, but again, I was pretty responsible about it, so I never really got in trouble.

I was actually pretty cautious about most things, because I had been conditioned to believe that if anything was going to go wrong, it would go wrong with me. From using my dad’s tools, to my parents’ vehicles, anything… When I used it, whether or not I was using it correctly, it would break. Yes, sometimes it was because of my typical teenage attitude, and lack of care for something that wasn’t mine, but even when I would show respect, use it as intended, it would still break. Frankly, I have never lived this down with my family.

I have come to think that the Chairman of the Committee is one person although, it is multiple different versions of that person, and that person is ME. The old cliché of “You’re your own worst enemy” has never been more prevalent than in my head. There is third grade me that can’t fucking spell mosquito, there is seventh grade me with green hair, eighth grade me who thinks he’s some sort of gangbanging tagger in the hard streets of Tempe, AZ, the twenty-year-old me that wants to have fun at all costs even when he knows he shouldn’t, and multiple other versions of me that were never able to be let go. For most of my life, I have been able to meld into whatever group I am around at that time, whether it be my friend group, any one of them, at work, in a new place, wherever, I have been able to find common ground and be what I needed to be at that moment.

I wouldn’t say that I am a con artist in this sense, because I am not doing it to gain or take anything from them. I have just had a lot of different life experiences, I read a lot, I have worked in damn near every industry, most of which dealt directly with people, I have been married, divorced, married again and have one son and multiple nieces and nephews. All this culminated into who I am today, but none of it has ever made me feel worthy of really anything. The voice that I hear daily is one that makes me feel like I am less than, like I have everyone fooled, and at some point, it is all going to come crashing down and my unworthiness will be visible for everyone to see. This voice, or the Chairman, is incessant and degrading, but it’s all my voice. I am seeing through this journey of therapy and this blog, that each version of me served a purpose at one stage in my life or another, but none of them serve me anymore, and I am ready to move past them. I heard a great quote that I am trying to use more in my life, “The Imposter(s) were made to protect me in whatever time of my life they blossomed, but they no longer serve me in being who I really am.”

I will leave you with a quote from The Middle Finger Project by Ash Ambirge, a book about beating Imposter Syndrome (It is very female forward, but the info is useful to all), “Imposter Syndrome is the assassin of DREAMS.” There is no better way of putting it, I can personally attest to the Imposter assassinating multiple dreams throughout my life, even still. This is why I am working so hard to rid myself of it, and help others do the same.

Thank you. – Mike