Pay It Forward: Sharing Your Story on Medium
Even when a pesky projector and your imposter syndrome don’t want you to
I gave a talk this past Tuesday for Madison Women in Tech on writing for Medium. The space I was hosting in had a deceptively simple projector setup. I’ve heard from other developers that tech breaks around us and this was no exception. It logged me out, displaying an IP address with a code and none of us could figure out how to get in. Many buttons were pushed.
Thankfully, my Madison Women in Tech co-organizer Hilary was there and with a can-do attitude whipped out her laptop. Which was very fortunate, as I was definitely in more of a can’t-do or can-don’t place. We all got in a circle looking at mine or hers. A much less stressful way to present if you are, like me and several billion other humans, not into public speaking. Still, I kind of felt like it didn’t count. I’m never the level of prepared I want to be and wonkiness like this follows me around like a less cool groupie.
At one point, it came up that I’ve only published on Medium once and I felt like a bit of a fraud. I explained it away as wanting to share as a beginner, to convince myself as much as anyone else. Really I’m not always sure what’s holding me back from posting there more. I think it’s feeling done enough to ask other people…
