For years that voice and I were mortal enemies. There it was, the insistent whisper of imposter syndrome, telling me that I’d be ‘found out’, that it was only a matter of time before everyone discovered I wasn’t good enough and I’d be cast out.
Never was it louder or more persistent than when somehow, miraculously, despite having the kind of childhood that usually results in books with sepia-coloured crying children on their covers, I got my first literary novel published.
That voice fed on my ‘otherness’ in the literary world so far from the Aberdeen council estates and care homes I grew up in.
Queer, working class, university dropout (twice), unconnected, outspoken and sweary. There was all the fuel I needed to remind myself that I didn’t belong.
My imposter syndrome told me ‘this is not for you’
This is not for you, said that voice when I had my first meeting at Random House. This is not for you, said that voice when my first book won the Scottish First Book Prize, then my third book was shortlisted for Scottish Nonfiction Book of the Year.
This is not for you, said that voice before every festival, radio and TV interview. This is not for you, said the same voice when I started teaching creative writing at the University of Glasgow.
Just as it had when I beat Martin Amis to France’s most prestigious award for foreign fiction, the Prix Femina Etrangér and collected my award in a room like a gold jewellery box, spent the next 24 hours posing for gangs of photographers, drinking champagne at a party held in my honour and shuttling about Paris to interviews with my glamorous PR.
Because that voice was proven right, two weeks after I won the Prix Femina Etrangér, a few years before I would write my book Lowborn, I returned to London to a tiny sublet room in Whitechapel, did my sums with my heart hammering in my throat and realised I didn’t have enough money to get me to Christmas.
With no one to borrow from and no family home to return to, I accepted the fate of anyone who’s ever needed work and money quickly: the call centre.
So, a month after I was flicking through French papers with my picture in them and scoffing free patisserie like there was no tomorrow (because, indeed, there wasn’t), I took a minimum wage, zero-hour contract telemarketing job, asking old age pensioners, among other ridiculous things, how often they liked to do Zumba.
I don’t think I can give full credit to the bleakness of that call centre except to say it was in the hinterlands of the London suburbs and I walked through three dog crap-peppered murder underpasses from the tube to get there. The rest of my team were sixteen-year-old kids, unused to work and excited by lunchtime expeditions to Chicken Cottage.
Relief came from guardian angels
Relief then came in the form of a grant from the guardian angels of Writers Who are Not Rich, the Royal Literary Fund, and then my French royalties rolling in, signalling a long respite from call centres and doing sums with my heart pounding and my ability to write my memoir, the book that changed my life and my career.
In the end, those few months, during which that voice continually shouted, TOLD YOU SO, were the most valuable of my whole career. That nosedive, from toast of Paris, to barely affording a piece of toast, taught me to view that voice differently.
That time taught me that, yes, that voice can be impossibly loud but, ultimately, it could also protect me.
That voice taught me to define myself only by my writing, not by my achievements, plaudits or income which I believe is a huge blessing in an industry where, just like Project Runway, one day you’re in and the next you’re out.
That voice helped me understand that I should enjoy my giddy highs but that I wasn’t owed them.
They could go away and that would be OK because I would still write regardless. I finally realised it had never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to, in fact, that voice had urged me on. It made me work so much harder than I would have if it simply crooned, ‘You’re the best, Kerry’.
There are other benefits. Yes, that voice reminds me of my outsider status, that I’m different, an observer, but that’s what made me a good writer in the first place.
Now, I’ve learned to nurture that voice, I understand it’s not out to get me, it’s a reminder to have some humility. And yes, it can be too loud, if I let it, it could be diminishing, if let it, but it’s my job to keep the balance, to not allow it to become the full-throated shout of Imposter Syndrome. If I can do that it will be good for me.
That voice is a reminder that one day the champagne and book sales may well run dry but that I know what is important and, crucially, that voice will keep me striving no matter what.
Kerry Hudson is an Aberdeen-born, award-winning writer of novels, memoirs and screenplays
Conversation