But what if I’m really an imposter?

This one is different y’all. I’m shaking as I write it and as I write it, I’m transported back to the day where my heart was broken, and my reality was crushed forever. I was in the home stretch of my PhD. One chapter was completed and the other two in the final editing stages. I had worked tirelessly with my primary advisor to make sure each chapter was “almost perfect” before sending them to my committee members. Once I edited draft after draft with my advisor, she would finally approve it as good to send.

One day, oddly she told me that she had received some comments directly from one of my committee members and she was going to forward them to me. I say this was odd because this same committee member had already sent me comments and we had been sending emails on a group thread. I excused this slight weirdness and opened the forwarded email from my advisor. I saw similar comments to the ones I had already received so I kept looking through the thread searching for something I must have missed. And wow did my search turn up something that I had definitely missed! The conversation went like this:

Committee member: Did T work with someone on the microbial stuff? The writing on that seems distinctly different from the rest of the paper. Not a big deal, but curious.

My advisor: YES, her coauthor is X from X’s lab. X has already been through the methods and results part.

Committee member: OK, that makes sense, both in why that section is different, and why I recognize the writing. I’ve written a number of things with X at this point, so her style is very familiar.

My advisor: Good! Unfortunately, I have to have a lot of trust on that part!

Committee member: The microbial parts are by far the tightest sections, so it’s good.

My advisor: Thanks. I am not complaining, but it has been a process even getting complete sentences……. She has come a long way, but her writing is not there yet. I do worry about that for a post-doc.

My world came crashing down. I already had a job lined up, we had already submitted a paper together, I was graduating in 3 weeks, I was betrayed, I was devastated, I was ANGRY. I couldn’t reconcile, this lady who I had grown to love was talking shit about me in an email. And more than talking shit, she didn’t think I could write a complete sentence? She was concerned for my postdoc; the same one she wrote a letter of recommendation for?! I lost it. I cried for days. I disappeared from the world. I was crushed. Everything I had ever thought about my own intellectual abilities came rushing to my head and all led to the questions I had been avoiding since getting dismissed from ODU,

What if I’m really an imposter?

What if I really don’t belong here?

What if it is me?

I looked back at the convo, picked it apart, and realized the facts. The facts were, my advisor knew nothing about microbes. I had to learn everything on my own and partner with someone else from another lab. This was the only section that my advisor did not touch while editing, she quickly said I’ll leave this to you and left me on my own. I did ask X for input on the section, but I mainly wrote it alone following an outline. So, the fact that the committee member called this section out as the best actually highlights my writing skills, but instead of my advisor giving me credit, she slights me and suggests that X (a white woman) wrote it for me. Both of them then proceeded to discuss how that was a great section and tighter than all the rest (again a nod to how I worked better by myself versus all the pre-work I had done with my advisor). Instead of her defending me and saying how hard we had worked she then makes the comments that I can’t even write, and she is concerned about me moving on. Prior to this, I had never heard these concerns and was completely blindsided.

 I left my PhD more discouraged than I had ever been. My own advisor didn’t think I could write, my own committee members didn’t believe in me, but they still signed off for me to graduate. Why? That question has kept me up at night for months over the last year. Every answer I come up with causes me to cringe and shake the possibility out of my head. I hate to think it was because it was the last year of funding for my minority scholarship and the department was going to have to fund my next year, if I continued. I hate to think that maybe our lab had got a little too Black and we needed to get folx out. I hate to think it was so they could say that the first Black person had graduated from their diversity program. I hate to think, so I don’t think about it. I try to boost myself back up and shake it off, but it’s a haunting feeling. I have PTSD.

 Every time I go to work on papers from my dissertation, anxiety fills my body and I can’t do it, so they just sit there. All that hard work and who knows if it will ever get published. All that hard work to become a doctor, just for me to question if I’m really an imposter?   In my soul, I know that I’m not and that I do good work. But a piece of my spirit was broken so the papers remain unwritten, but my story no longer remains untold! So please accept this blog post for now…no complete sentences required!