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I think I now know what’s another of my problems. As if the demands of being a textbook INTJ aren’t quite enough, I believe I may be suffering from what pop psychology calls the ‘Imposter Phenomenon’. In a moment of revelation and relief I came across the term (I forgot how I got there) and sniffed these out, which have very much hit home:

The imposter:

The extreme mismatch between objective evidence of accomplishment and a person’s self-evaluation to the extent it seriously interferes with their ability to realize their potential.

The Imposter Phenomenon:

Despite outstanding academic and professional accomplishments, women who experience the imposter phenomenon persists in believing that they are really not bright and have fooled anyone who thinks otherwise. Numerous achievements, which one might expect to provide ample object evidence of superior intellectual functioning, do not appear to affect the impostor belief.

(Also mentions upbringing, the family environment and expectations as possible factors in perpetuating the phenomenon.)

Unmasking the imposter phenomenon:

An occasional bout of insecurity isn’t necessarily detrimental – for some people, self-doubt is the pointy stick they use to prod themselves to redouble their efforts and, in the end, spur themselves to greater success. But for others, these feelings of inadequacy – even among people with solid records of achievement – are persistent, poisoning their every accomplishment with an overwhelming fear of being found incompetent.

Aye, over-preparing, over-analysing. Good’s never good enough. It might have contributed in no small part to the lack of blog posts in recent times, and the extreme slow pace of progress in many of the things I’ve been trying to do. The more I read and research, the more aware I become of my ignorance of everything. Was it Socrates who said “I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance”?

*shrugs* Now… what’s the treatment?

For nights since my return I’ve been glancing at the time while in bed – 4am and I’m drifting in and out of sleep. Jetlagged and fraklagged – poo has its ways of catching up. After going through the 900 or so unread work-related emails that didn’t make it through the forwarder, sure enough, the queasy stomach had involuntarily returned. It’s squirming as I type.

I thought mainly about the resolutions I had made during the trip, the alternate, invisible and silent journey which began as I was lying on the New Forest moors.

I was questioning myself. Why do I want to do what I want to do? Why do I want to return? Am I happy? Would I be happier there? Can I be equally happy here? Why? Why not? What’s important to me? Why has this year been such a ruckus? I had many intellectual answers but none satisfied. I turned inward and probed deeper, penetrating the barriers of (non-)emotional defence. I don’t believe I’ve consciously done that before, but the weak and battered mind, yet to recover from recent battles fought, left keys in locks.

It brought me to re-examine my relationships with family and friends. And my relationship with myself, at the risk of sounding narcissistic (all personal blogs are naturally so, so that’s a lost cause there).

On the first night back, I was thinking about the day ahead, mustering the courage to deny a service, wondering if I and others could forgive me if I did.

Something had changed, and I felt compelled to follow a course of action that in the past I would have eliminated in the earlier rounds of solution-seeking.

Something told me that a humble yum cha with family is more important than a volunteer assignment. Granted, it was more than just a volunteer assignment; if I pushed it I could say it was something I gave my word to, although the situation wasn’t right for its undertaking as the expected external arrangements fell through. But a yum cha is also more than just picking at dim sum with chopsticks at a noisy Chinese restaurant; it is a reaffirmation of family ties. Something was also telling me, look, you’ve got a few hours left to tackle those hundreds of emails, read and absorb dozens of training slides and briefing material, figure out what you need to do for Tuesday and the YOG, and those few hours cannot be left to start past midnight should I opt for the nobler calling. Something was telling me that there’s no time. Geddit into your thick head: there’s not enough time to do everything.

Something was booming into my ear: YOU GOTTA TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. In that voice were echos of advice given by friends, some delivered with a frown, others with a disapproving elder-brotherly tsk, all flowing with genuine concern.

I listened, and decided, but I stumbled when I hesitated to communicate. People can get real upset when you’re no longer accommodating. If the fear of the suffering can be greater than the suffering itself, can the fear of the upset be greater than upset itself? Guilt induces action, but guilt can also paralyse.

For how many years now, have I detected the feelings of dejection in a friend as she waits for me to check my schedule for free dates, and the pangs of disappointment (in both of us) when I cannot meet a simple request for a night out and a dinner?

How many emails, messages and texts have I put off replying, for I was too caught up with the task at hand, letting work, business and ‘important stuff’ take priority?

Yet how many more emails, messages and texts have I not replied due to that guilt paralysis that persisted into the procrastination of the execution of the former?

How many times have I missed being in the moment, in the company of friends, when I was jabbing away at my phone, settling one issue or another?

How many times have I had to reply in the negative to a friend who was seeking a shooting buddy in someplace wild, where I’d very much prefer to be?

How many times have I heard, from almost everyone around me: “Relax!” “Smile!” “You’re so boring!” “SMILE!” “Don’t be so serious!” “Don’t be so uptight!” ?

Why am I always so hung up on work? I’m not even speaking of a career here. It’s just that – plain ‘ole simple honest work, physical and mental labour. I spoke often of the drive to accomplish, to do things, to continually be spending my time productively, applying my skills effectively, devoting myself to bigger causes. But it has become an unhealthy obsession. A crippling habit. A force that has gained its own momentum and has snowballed out of my control.

I tried, as much as I could, to keep away from work, during my trip. Even that wasn’t easy.

I cannot recall a time when my life here has not been overwhelmed by projects and events. I ran my life on meetings, errands and never-ending tasks, being sucked into blackholes. A glance at some of my old blog posts would suggest that nothing much has changed. Nothing much ever changes when I’m in Singapore.

What kept me going, making the same flawed decisions again and again, despite the fact that I wasn’t any more relieved but was in fact made to feel worse off? A sense of duty. Or so I thought. And so I’ve been told.

A sense of duty to what?

I thought about that too. If it’s a sense of duty to others, it should be to the people I have a duty of care towards. That would mean, ranking among the first of them, my family. Then friends. But no – history has shown that I have quite often put my family in second place. I was putting the needs of and my obligations towards strangers and people I couldn’t quite classify as friends, above people I should really be caring about.

If it’s a sense of duty to myself, well, that’s just silly, for what skewed sense of duty would it be if I was just working myself to smithereens? Nevermind the thought that I cannot bear to have failed to meet others’ expectations, or that I cannot meet my expectations… when I was becoming so tired that I didn’t even have the energy left to think or care about whether or not I was meeting expectations!

And if it’s a sense of duty to the task itself? Err, that’ll make me a robot.

“You’re only human.”

A humbling fact that cannot be reiterated enough.

I was always going against what I wanted to do (asking instead what I’m ’supposed’ to do or asking what is ‘right’ failed to work a long time ago) to accommodate others, to please others, or simply not to hurt others, or not wanting to contaminate my integrity (or what I considered was it). In the end I’d end up not doing the things I needed to get done. It wasn’t so much of the actual work – it’s never about the work itself. It’s always the conflicting needs, all the different sides, these seemingly trivial decisions that send ripples of repercussions across everything else on my plate and the neighbouring glass of water, which is never empty. I was eating away at my own happiness.

Too many tasks, too many people, too many organisations, too many groups within an organisation, too many conflicts, only one moment a time, only one me.

My mom walked out of my room a few seconds ago. Posed another layer to another dilemma. This Friday: my aunt and cousins are visiting from Hong Kong and they’d like to have dinner with the family. The Scouts are asking for a meeting (two meetings, in fact, on the same day) and both are groups of people to which I hold some form of responsibility. There is also some administrative paperwork that needs doing at HQ, with the next day as a deadline. I have to be at the airport to receive my Olympics Principal at 4am, Saturday morning – the start of a marathon of 11 absolutely-filled-to-the-seams full days of work, and I’ll need to prepare for that, with some info only coming in on Friday morning.

I could write entire chapters out of such likes.

As the weight of the stress resulting from the… post-mortem of these situations accumulated, I crack.

Being busy was my fuel.

But I’ve combusted.

Crash and burn…

Crashed and burnt!

“You’re only human.”

Lessons learnt.

I cannot keep sacrificing myself.

Now I can hear them cry “But! We cannot do without you! Things will fall apart!” Or is that just a voice in my head? My parents think so. I think not. But can I afford to care? Nobody in this world is indispensable. Everyone is expendable, replaceable. Except for maybe, well, parents. And siblings. And relatives. And friends. Close friends. These are they who are loveable. But not volunteers, employees, grunts. Even Steve Jobs was once squeezed out of his own company. The world will keep spinning.

It is easy to understand the fear that is attached to the notion that being self-assertive and having a greater consideration for my own needs can be construed as being selfish – nobody enjoys being called selfish. But friends, the University of Life and School of Hard Knocks (as Blackadder calls them), are teaching me lessons. The better I can look out for myself, the better I can serve others, and the richer all my relationships and my life can be.

What a very un-INTJ thing to say!

But then again, it’s quite like the INTJs too to be able to logically re-define their lives and choose to ‘right’ themselves onto a better path. ;)

Some of the issues may have been diluted, confused, simplified as I blabber along, but I see the convoluted threads in my mind with a just-about-legible clarity and they make sense. Some threads were probably left out. I know where to go from here, and I now know what may be more important to me… than what I previously thought was important. It’ll take some experimenting, and major changes in perspectives and behaviours to find out. It’ll take lots of courage and risks.

I kept asserting that it’s the freedom in London that is drawing me back; I guess it’s not merely the intellectual, political, cultural, physical and filial freedom. It’s also the freedom to live for myself and those close to me, without needing to feel guilty about it.

The most mistrustful of our kings made himself secure mainly by voluntarily surrendering his life and entrusting his liberty to the hands of his foes, showing complete trust in them so that they might learn trust from him… It is an excellent way to win the heart and mind of another man to go and trust him, putting yourself in his power – provided it be done freely, quite unconstrained by necessity, and on condition that the trust we bring is clear and pure, and that at least our brow is not weighed down by hesitations.

~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

A man had need have sound ears to hear himself frankly criticised; and as there are few who can endure to hear it without being nettled, those who hazard the undertaking it to us manifest a singular effect of friendship; for ’tis to love sincerely indeed, to venture to wound and offend us, for our own good. I think it harsh to judge a man whose ill qualities are more than his good ones: Plato requires three things in him who will examine the soul of another: knowledge, benevolence, boldness.

~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

I am not so much worried about how I am in the minds of other men as how I am to myself. I want to be enriched by me not by borrowings from others. Those outside us only see events and external appearances… They do not see my mind: they only see the looks on my face.

That is why all those judgements which are based on external appearances are unbelievably unreliable and dubious, and why there is no more reliable witness than each man is to himself.

~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

The realisation that I have been becoming a less confident person, in some aspects, is not entirely new. It is more evidently felt when I am engaging people, or set myself on some new task - assignments that may not be altogether alien to my experience. It is an unpleasant realisation, made worse knowing that the process can be accumulative and detrimental.

This is not an inferiority complex (neither is it, as this denial may suggest, on the other extreme: narcissism)… this is merely self-awareness.

The lack of confidence, I deduce, stems from not only the lack of independence in thought and action (or rather, the over-reliance on dependence and family), but also the feeling of a lack of control or direction over my life, instead being controlled by forces around me.

I had previously [private post] acknowledged - although not necessary accepted - that my drive to accomplish and achieve has been greatly diminished following a change in philosophy concerning the pursuit of contentment, but I had, in all honesty, not anticipated how this might then affect self-esteem. It is not that I am incapable of controlling how I respond to them - of course, we always have a choice - but the existence of these circumstances does propel me towards certain decisions, to continually make conscious decisions to go against what I would otherwise decide had these forces been absent. It is not healthy, but these forces do exist, and the values that admonish me to submit to them supersede all else.

Frequent commerce with the world can be an astonishing source of light for a man’s judgement. We are all cramped and confined inside ourselves: we can see no further than the end of our noses. When they asked Socrates where he came from he did not say ‘From Athens’, but ‘From the world’. He, whose thoughts were fuller and wider, embraced the universal world as his City, scattered his acquaintances, his fellowship and his affections throughout the whole human race, not as we do who only look at what lies right in front of us.

~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

When the mind is satisfied, that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities. It makes sorties which go beyond what it can achieve: it is only half-alive if it is not advancing, pressing forward, getting driven into a corner and coming to blows; its inquiries are shapeless and without limits; its nourishment consists in amazement, the hunt and uncertainty.

~ Montaigne, The Complete Essays (1587-88)

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on”;

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And - which is more - you’ll be a Man my son!

~ Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)