Aren't you a little old for insecurities?

It's time for another installment of Insecure Writer's Support Group. If you're so inclined visit the linky page here, and say hi to Ninja Captain Alex (tell him The Doctor sent you). This month's co-hosts are L.G. Keltner, Denise Covey, Sheri Larsen, J.Q. Rose, Chemist Ken, and Michelle Wallace!

I’d like to think that at some point along the journey of my life, I would have outgrown insecurities. It’s not that I ever made it my goal, but when I was a kid, all the adults seemed to have it together. None of them seemed like the world was eating them from the inside out with everything from “will they like my book” to “Oh, god, I hope no one figures out I’m a complete fraud.”

Because of that, I sort of assumed there must be something wrong with me since I continued to feel the insecurities. I thought they were something we would outgrow with age. I’d hoped that at some point I’d “get there,” and I wouldn’t still wonder how long it would take before people realized I was just a sheep in wolf’s clothing. I remember buying my first house and wondering when the people were going to show up and say “Nope, sorry ma’am, only grownups get to do that.”

It’s because I’ve never felt the way my mom looked when I was a kid. She was always so confident and in charge of everything.

Turns out it was all a big fake.

My mom confessed to me how worried she was all the time when we were kids. She told me about how she felt judged by people, how she could never seem to get things right, how she decided that having clean butts was better than having clean clothes on more than one occasion. She worried that she’d be fired from her job. She worried that everything she did would turn out for nothing. She worried about the bills.

And all that time, she swung through life like a wrecking ball, obliterating obstacles dumb enough to get in her way. To give you an example: she once chain-sawed a house in half, loaded it onto two flatbeds, drove it forty miles, poured a foundation around it and rented it out for years and years.

Yeah, she poured the foundation when I was still in a playpen. That’s not the kind of woman you expect to be haggard by self doubt. And yet, she was.

So yeah, I’d hoped to outgrow this self doubt, but the real key is to keep going. You’re the only one who sees the insecurities. The people around you see how you sawed that house in half and put it back together. (And to be honest, sometimes, they're worried you might be looking for something else to cut in half and load onto a truck to get it the heck out of your way)