Until

Here would be a nice place  to visit right now.

A while back, having not lied about my skills but fluffed them up a bit, I was hired into a position that was too big for me. I mean, I was thrilled and told everyone about it, but a few weeks in, despite good performance, I still felt like a worried forest animal all the time.  

I was not suffering from feelings of incompetence, I was suffering from thinking I should know more, right now.

A few special words turned things around.

I might have seen them once in the Ask Beth column that I read in my teens, or they may have been scrawled on a bathroom stall in college, but they circled back years later to tell me :

“Act as if you already feel the way you want to, until you do.”

With practice, I could imitate a feeling of confidence, until it came naturally. I lost the feeling that at any moment, I would be discovered and eventually, my eyebrows came back down.. 

The terms “imposter syndrome,” and, “fraud complex,"  refer to the fear of not being truly matched with, or passionate about, or skilled enough to live up to a hard-won goal, despite measures of success. They get tossed around a lot, particularly by young people in their first significant jobs. 

It had been exactly that suspicion I grappled with back before it became a syndrome.  I felt I’d been nailed selling myself long when actually I had not yet tested the reach of my experience and had to, as they say, "fake it ‘til you make it.”

  

I like my adage better, but here’s the word that makes both of them worth putting on a post-it and sticking it where you’ll see it every day: until.

Not only because of its truth – that all things – flying, public transportation, presentations – become less daunting with exposure, but also because all wrapped up in the word “until” is the reminder that the present, with all its power, comes to our lives just once, to inform what will come next.

Because, as I have told myself, my friends, my children, and sometimes their friends, and occasionally strangers and fretful dogs,

Everything, up or down, is just right now.

All moments that come after right now, suggested by the word until, will be influenced by those that came before. Whether they’ve made you richer or poorer, or educated about how to live better, no moment will find you less knowledgeable than you are right now, only more. 

And imagine that, what you can do with those moments of smarter.

You may love feeling free and independent and mobile until you learn that your maturity and self-awareness have left you with gifts to bring to a relationship, maybe a marriage, maybe even at some point, small people who will spend years literally, and then figuratively looking up to you. 

You may be frustrated with the cost of living and bored with the job that once terrified you until you realize you have also earned the courage to go after the thing you’d rather look back on in a couple of decades.  

You may be new and awkward in a strange place until you master your surroundings and wish to build a new memory of conquering change because, look! Now you know how.

You may be tired of understanding and learning and changing your mind about yourself, until you realize that at the same time, you were also understanding and learning and changing your mind about others too.

The word “until” is weighty. It suggests that you can stay or go, but are always on the way to something else that will draw on your cumulative smarts, and hopefully enrich your spirit and sense of humor about life.

Whether you long to leave, or dread when you will have to, “until” is a word equally full of promise and relief that gently asks you to trust the future, while you get ready to create it.