Of Birthing Calves and Career Patterns

Imposter Syndrome doesn’t just pop up out of nowhere.

Picture this.  It’s winter. Far below zero. Easily a foot of snow on the ground and more is falling.  Your older brother had been out checking the herd and you, a skinny 12-year old,  had been tasked with breaking the ice on the spring to get us water as the water tank and pipes were frozen.  It was pitch-black—the opposite of those big full-moon nights at 4,000 ft elevation, miles and miles from any source of light pollution when you could see every little thing which make playing Ollie Ollie Oxen Free ridiculously easy.  No, this was a “you are going to step off the edge of the world “dark. 

Your brother comes into the house and reports that a cow is down calving.  He’s wet and freezing by this time, so you are elected to go back out into the night with mom—bundled up, carrying a lantern, flashlight, a knife, a garbage bag, a couple of flakes of hay, and some chain and a rope because more than likely you are going to have to pull this calf.  No one to ask for help and no phone to call anyone who might give some pointers. You get down into the field, find the cow and she’s down—tired and cold and half covered with snow.  You are smaller so you put on a plastic glove and shove your hand, carrying the chain, up and into the cow, hoping that you find the front hooves, that you get the chain around them both and that when you pull the calf out of the mom, you don’t pull the rest of her insides out with it.  This is not the cute and fluffy newborn calf of tv…nope, it’s covered in blood and other stuff, and you are set to drying it/warming it by rubbing it with the hay while your mom deals with the afterbirth and cord. Then you are carrying all your gear, plus a garbage bag full of afterbirth, back up to the house while your mom is saying something about learning on the job.  Later, when your dad calls from Rome, he’s proud of you and happy the calf is alive and before he wants you to hand the phone back to your mom, you hear him say something like, “one down, 30 to goâ€. 

You?  You are nauseas and covered in gross stuff and your arm hurts so bad from the contractions and the cold and you still have no idea what just happened, but it’s clear that it is expected of you again.  And right then, in that moment, the conjoined twins of procrastination and Imposter Syndrome were born, the afterbirth of which will follow you for years into your career.

In 1972 when Dad moved us from our safe life in the Bay Area to the Ranch in Oregon, none of us had any idea what we were doing.  Which couldn’t stand in the way—lives were literally on the line.  It was a working ranch with cows, horses, pigs, sheep, chickens, peacocks, turkeys, guinea hens….and a generator, our own spring and in the first few years, no phone.  You had haying in the summer, irrigating in the spring and summer and rounding up cows in the fall. Feeding animals in the winter and calving in the spring. Pair this with Dad, a pilot for Pan American, being gone from the Ranch two weeks out of every month and you had a woman and her children running a ranch on some fucked up amalgamation of binder twine, common sense and learning on the job, or what would later call ‘fake it till you make it’.

Picking rocks out of the garden, mowing the lawn, feeding the chickens and cows.  Not only were these chores easy to learn and do—but they allowed me to retreat into my imagination and create stories—stories that gave me ease and respite from the anxiety and fear.  And I could stretch these easy chores out so the harder, scarier things on the list were pushed off. And let’s be transparent here, harder wasn’t about time or intensity, but rather it was simply a modifier to “scarierâ€. 

Scary because most of the time, like with pulling the calf, I had no fucking clue what I was doing. Scary because there was more riding on the outcome.  Scary because of the higher chance of failure.  Scary because failure would bring condemnation, disappointment and potentially the loss of love. And scary because the longer you put it off, the bigger and nastier all the outcomes became. And, finally, scary because if you pulled it off, the resulting expectations were fucking terrifying.  Talk about a vicious circle.

Procrastination could and would get me into trouble here and there, but those consequences were far easier to deal with than those that came with ‘fake it till you make it’ failures and the Imposter Syndrome fuck-ups of my early career.  Some of which make me cringe and shudder even today—years and years and yes, years, later. And learning to step away from the Imposter in me and show up, questions and uncertainties on display was even harder.  I wanted to be the infallible hero, and worse, I’d taught those around me to expect the hero, the balls-out ‘get ‘er done’ girl.  But you can’t build a career on that and more importantly, I realized that the anxiety that came with procrastinating and that surrounded the Imposter, was not only incredibly detrimental emotionally and physically but that it wasn’t a price I wanted to pay anymore. It got in the way of creativity, took energy from the imagination and buried the empathy and vulnerability. The benefits of showing up authentically, flaws and all, was much more valuable to the team, as a leader and for myself.