Neurotic imposter.
Friday, August 15th, 2008
After years of hanging around the “geek” community but never really contributing to it as such (at least not in any formal way, such as giving a presentation), I find myself signed up to give a talk at BarCamp Brighton 3.
Jeremy has been encouraging me for years to attend a BarCamp. I realize they’re very “loose” events—much like Reboot, in fact—where anyone can speak about anything and even first-time presenters are welcomed and supported. And, as Jeremy says, some of the best BarCamp talks he’s experienced have been ones which weren’t “geeky” in the techie sense at all—talks about whether Cornwall is part of England, for instance, or how to make the perfect cup of tea. Andy has presented on mixing the perfect margarita, and Jeremy himself has talked about technology and the transmission of Irish traditional music. So there’s no question that BarCamp is a mixed bag.
And yet…and yet…it’s still a geek event. I’ve argued to Jeremy that he can talk about Irish music, or Andy can talk about margaritas, because they’ve already proven their “geek credentials”. They have established roles in the Web community, so it’s fine for them to break out of those roles occasionally and talk about different interests, because beyond the Irish music and the margaritas, there’s all the DOM scripting and CSS and microformats and Web design, and everyone knows that.
But for someone like me to come in from the outside, as it were, and talk about something maybe not entirely Web-related…well, I just feel like people are going to wonder what the heck I’m doing there. Jeremy argues that 1) BarCamp isn’t about “credentials” or “proving something”, and 2) I’m more geeky than I give myself credit for. Both of those things may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I have serious doubts about attending a BarCamp and expecting people to listen to and be interested in what I have to say.
There’s a part of me that knows I’m being too dismissive of myself. I mean, I work on the Web, for God’s sake. But I have that typical perfectionist trait of constantly feeling like a big fake (apparently it’s known as neurotic imposture, which sounds quite mad indeed). I know that I know a lot and I know that I’m good at what I do, and yet I go through life thinking that, at any moment, someone’s going to turn towards me and do that freaky pointing-and-shrieking thing from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and say, “You’re a fraud! You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what you’re talking about!”
But with all of that in mind, I’m still going to give a talk at BarCamp. It’s face your fears time again, I guess. I’ve already started to outline my presentation—and it’s about translation, something I really do know something about. I want to give people an insight into what a translator does (because I’m always surprised at just how many people don’t really know) and what simple steps can be taken to ensure that multilingual websites are pleasant to read and easy to use. For all my qualms, I’m actually kind of excited; I do like nattering on about language, after all. And if my talk prompts just one person to say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that!”, then I figure the whole thing will have been worth it.
