There’s a term for the feeling that you’re not as good as people think you are. That you’ve fooled them somehow, and eventually they’ll figure it out. That your success is luck or accident rather than skill or effort. Impostor syndrome is real. It keeps genuinely talented people from putting their work into the world, from taking the seat, from raising their hand.
My son doesn’t have it.
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I got feedback from the editor a few weeks ago.
The notes were better than I expected. The voice is working. He found no places where it breaks. He called it a strong draft and said he didn’t have a long list of major overhauls. For a first editorial assessment on a memoir I wrote alone over several years, that landed well.
But one note stayed with me.
The arc flattens in the back half. The first seventy or eighty pages have urgency and momentum. After the new normal is established, readers lose the driving question. He wanted to feel spikes on the seismograph. Major moments, framed with more intention, so readers stay invested.
I knew exactly what he meant. I’ve been reading spikes on a graph for twelve years. Just not a seismograph.
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I came across a post on Instagram recently. It said something like: no one talks about the grief of giving medications to a child who can’t tell you how they feel.
I’ve been thinking about that. Not for the first time.
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I was sitting in an AI users group meeting at work recently. We went around the room and people described what they had been using the tools for. It wasn’t a technical crowd. These were people with domain knowledge and good instincts who had previously been blocked by a specific kind of gap. The gap between knowing what they needed and being able to build it themselves.
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I got to the airport early even though I knew the flight was delayed.
I had been tracking it since he left Arizona. Texts from him at the gate. Updates from his mom. A text when he boarded that landed differently than the others. He was on the plane, he was coming home. I had my gate pass in hand before I left the house.
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I’m Dave. I write about raising a son with refractory epilepsy.
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