Tag Archives: impostor syndrome

Breaking Down at Sex Down South

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It’s the sign of a good conference if you’re affected emotionally, but I generally prefer not to end up in tears.

I recently attended Sex Down South, a sex and sexuality conference in Atlanta. It’s a great event featuring sex educators and layfolk discussing sex, advocacy, and relationships in an array of lectures, panels, and workshops. One of the things I love about it is that it explicitly prioritizes the experiences of people of color and queer folk: perspectives that are often overlooked in discussions about sex.

This year’s theme was “The Politics of Pleasure,” and most talks explored that in some way: the idea that how we choose our partners is political, the difficulty of approaching consent around trauma survivors or when exploring complicated kinks, or the process of effective advocacy for healthier sexuality. It was heavy stuff, and by early in the third and final day I was socially exhausted.

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Conscious Incompetence

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I like thinking and talking about stuff, but when try to I do so I often suspect that I don’t know enough to say something genuinely interesting. It’s not impostor syndrome (though I totally suffer from that). It’s a fear that if I talk about a complex subject that I don’t fully understand then I will come across as foolish (and therefore provide no benefit) to someone who knows it better. I’ve experienced this from the other side: seeing people write naïve things that aren’t even wrong about how software development works.

There are a few topics that I’m comfortable discussing because I know my limits in them:

  • Computer science and software development
  • Game design and development
  • Creative writing
  • Social justice, maybe?
  • Cooking

While there are plenty of topics that I’m sure I don’t know much about (beekeeping), there are a few that I consistently hesitate to write about for fear of creating a naïve argument. Some examples are Discordianism (due to my uncertainty with postmodernism and theology), economics, and narrative. I’m not even sure where to start to learn more; I don’t have much time for learning outside my focus fields, and I don’t even know enough to optimize that time. I don’t want to waste time reading a bunch of poorly-written texts before I gain enough understanding to tell what the good sources are.

I’m part of a mailing list that deals with art in games, and I often feel like one of the least-informed members. There are academics with years of theoretical underpinnings talking about complex things and I hesitate to spend an hour crafting what I think is insight only to discover that I’ve wasted the time and attention of an expert who recognizes my thoughts as that of an underinformed beginner.

Short of learning more (which I’m trying to do, despite the time it takes), I’m not sure how to deal with this dilemma. Any advice? How do you know when you’re well-informed enough to discuss something outside of your comfort zone?