impostor

When I was leaving Cora's today, I almost ran a stop sign and smashed into a truck. I careened to a violent halt and the driver gave me the glare of death, staring straight into my eyes while he pointed to the sign emphatically.

While this is undeniably just a good driver frustrated with the inadequacies of poor drivers who don't obey traffic signals, I chose to interpret it as a sign from God, mostly because it's Sunday and I was on my way to church and it just seems fitting. Besides, if I don't look at it that way, this blog post is cut kind of short, and I suppose would end right about here.

So anyways, God today took the form of some ruffian construction worker driving in his pickup and today pointed at me to take a look at what's around me and STOP. The message was clear: Here I am minding my own business not paying attention to what's going on around me and how I'm impacting the world, and I should take a breather, look up, and see how I am changing the world dynamically.

I haven't given myself a chance to think about myself lately. Well, that's a lie, I always exercise my metaconsciousness and evaluate what I'm doing on a moment-to-moment basis, but then therein lies my fault. I'm evaluating moment-to-moment and not seeing the big picture. I am so nose-to-the-grindstone that I'm not seeing that I'm making wheat products with the mill I am grinding.

So this segways into a question to myself: Am I an impostor? One of the greatest fallacies of grad students is the Impostor Syndrome, where we are unable to recognize if what we are doing is tangible, constructive or helpful in any way. I ask myself this question all the time - is anything I am doing meaningful?

I feel like an impostor at school, filing in every day among the ranks of these anatomical geniuses who probably sing the muscles, joints, bones and ligaments of the body in three-part harmony every morning while they have their breakfast. I stand in lab holding my goniometer as if it is some foreign instrument I have never seen before while the others use it with ease like it's a third arm. I feel so stupid, as if everything I have learned in undergrad and everything I have learned just last class has gone into my auditory canal, crawled into my brain and just curled up and died. I was awesome in undergrad and now?

I feel like an impostor at church, filing in every day among the ranks of these Biblical geniuses who probably sing the genealogy of Genesis and the gospel of Paul in three-part harmony every morning while they have their breakfast. I feel like I stand in church, arms supinated singing "how great is our God" when he's not even my God yet - what is this relationship with only a one-way acceptance? I go to cell group and speak and I sit at home and read and I lie down and pray but for what reason? Is this selfish, do I feel like I need a God and that's why I'm speaking to Him? What the hell (pun?) am I doing at church? Why is God so important if I recognize how much has been done for me but don't accept Jesus as my savior??? (!!!)

Mostly, I feel like an impostor with my friends. My mind is saying that I would be happy cooped up in my room with a coffee reading but my soul tells me I need to be with people. I stand in 528 lab sometimes when everyone has partnered up and I go to the front of class and yell, "Does anyone not have a partner?" and that's who I go with, like the last person to be chosen when everyone's picking teams. I stand in the sanctuary surrounded by all these brothers and sisters who have come to worship and I don't know any of their names or have forgotten them. I leave immediately after the service.

Honestly? I'm kind of lonely. I don't mean like support groups lonely - I could hang out with anyone and have a great time if I wanted to. I mean I feel lonely knowing that my personal satisfaction with my life will never be appeased and that I am the only one who can change that.

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Can't get over this tune: