Celebrating our Gardens

When I was eight, my grandmother’s garden filled my little-girl heart with delight: white snowdrops and blue crocuses pushing through the snow; purple tulips lighting up the spring; gorgeous peonies in summer; and black-eyed susans lazily arriving in the autumn.

Whenever people expressed astonishment or appreciation of my grandmother’s garden, she would say, “I can never get roses to grow. I’m not really a gardener.”.   All her success as the architect of such beauty rendered naught in that one moment of dismissal.

Born in 1900, my grandmother, Isabel, worked proudly as a nurse until she married at 27, when she gave up her career, like all women of her generation. She felt a bitter sense of loss and her compliance with the restrictive expectations for women in her day morphed over the years into a feeling of personal failure.

Sadly, many women today continue to feel like “failures” or “imposters” in our own lives.  We question ourselves so much and so often that self-doubt starts to feel like a natural state.  In fact, 90% of us report struggling with “imposter syndrome” to some degree, and research shows that 1 in 10 of us struggle with constant and acute self doubt. 

None of us is exempt. Last December, Michelle Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer, accomplished social activist and former First Lady of the United States, said, “I still have a little [bit of] imposter syndrome; it never goes away.”   

Self-doubt has ridden my back for years. When I went back to school in my fifties, younger students seemed faster and smarter than me. I was constantly asking for help from my professors or visiting the IT department with countless questions about online tools that were supposed to make my learning experience more efficient. I loved the academic work, but everything seem to take me twice as long and I often found myself wondering if I really deserved to be there.

Although I graduated with honours and even received a scholarship for outstanding work, my attention often turned to what I couldn’t do. Just like my grandmother, I couldn’t grow roses so I was a failure. (To read the rest of this, go to https://www.thewhig.com/opinion/columnists/celebrating-our-gardens)