I was sitting at the console, staring at the screen. Session open. Nothing flaming my inspiration.

Otis sat near, watching me with his thousand-yard stare.

“You’re doing it again.”

“Doing what?”

“That thing where humans decide they’re fakes.”

“Sometimes I feel like I’m just pretending, and flailing all the while,” I mumbled, scrolling through a set of files.

Otis blinked slowly. “Pretending?”

“It feels like everyone else knows what they’re doing, and I’m just floundering.”

Otis stretched for a few moments, then he pointed his nose toward the keyboard.

“Fine,” he said. “Pretend.”

I frowned. “Pretend, what?”

“Pretend to write a song.”
I looked at the screen. Bewildered.

Otis stretched again. “Go ahead,” he said. “Write a story while pretending you’re writing a story.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Exactly.”

He circled around the keyboard, threatening to take a nap on it. “You can pretend to be an artist in conversations or on social media. You can pretend when you talk about ideas.”

His tail flicked.

“But the moment you start doing the work, the pretending stops.”

Can We Help You?

If you sat down right now and started creating, would your impostor syndrome survive the first five minutes of real work?

Comment, share, subscribe… Otis is grateful for your presence here, and insists your feelings of pretending might clear up if you actually got down to work.

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