Amara Okonkwo-Bassey’s diary on impostor syndrome, a big stage, and getting through it anyway
The lineup included several poets I’ve genuinely admired for years, names I’ve quoted in my own workshop sessions, and standing backstage waiting for my slot, I spent a solid twenty minutes convinced, with real conviction, that someone had made an administrative mistake including me at all.
How I Actually Got Through the Anxiety
I didn’t fully shake it, if I’m honest, walked out onto that stage still half-convinced I didn’t belong there, and read anyway, because the alternative, backing out entirely, felt considerably worse than performing through genuine, unresolved doubt.
What Actually Happened Once I Started Reading
Something shifted around the second poem, the specific Lagos kitchen piece I’ve performed many times now, familiar enough that my body seemed to know what to do even while my mind was still half-convinced of its own inadequacy, and by the closing poem I’d stopped, mostly, thinking about whether I belonged and started simply being present in the actual reading.
The Conversation That Helped Most Afterward
One of the poets I’d admired for years, genuinely, sought me out afterward specifically to discuss a line from my second poem, treating me as a genuine peer rather than someone who’d wandered in by administrative accident, a small gesture that did more to settle my nerves than anything I’d managed to tell myself backstage.
What I’ve Learned About This Specific Kind of Doubt
I don’t think impostor syndrome simply resolves through reasoning yourself out of it beforehand. I think, at least for me, it resolves through doing the actual work anyway, letting the performance itself provide evidence the anxious voice can’t argue against as convincingly once you’re standing in it.
Where I Stand Now, A Few Days Later
Still slightly disbelieving, honestly, that I was on that stage at all, but with a genuine, growing certainty that I earned my place there, evidence gathered the hard way, through actually reading rather than through convincing myself in advance. Further diary entries continue at bohiney.com, with the original piece live at prat.uk.
SOURCE: https://prat.UK/