If you wanted to be an officer in the British Army back in the day, you had to pass a selection board down in Westbury, Wiltshire, called the RCB. I suspect that it’s much the same these days, but a bit more diverse. For a couple of days, you had to pretend that you were a) competent, b) motivated and c) laden up to the gunwales with lashings of leadership potential. It did not make for a pretty sight.
In my selection board, in June 1978, there were about eighteen people with self doubt, and two super-confident muscle bound candidates from the Parachute Regiment who made us all feel stupid and inadequate, who subtly sabotaged our own command tasks, and who ate ashtrays in their spare time because they were ‘that hard’. For my own part, I was a) impractical, b) desperate to be liked and c) slightly too inclined to think about cricket and sex, in that order, and I had long since decided that I would fail.
Unbelievably, it was the Paras who failed, and most of the rest of us passed. For the next eight years or so, I soldiered my way round the world wondering how on earth it was that no one had seen through, or was even now seeing through, my act. I am not alone in having felt that: most of my comrades did. And that’s not a bad thing. A sprinkling of self-doubt is often all that stops a cocky public school boy from believing all the dangerous nonsense they taught him in CCF; you know, the bit about ‘born leaders’. Self-doubt is not to be underestimated in the tool kit of keeping serving soldiers alive, and the world a happier place.
Forty years later, I am still wondering. Only, it is not about soldiering, which I think I was more or less alright at, but about writing. Like John Steinbeck said: ‘I’m not a writer; I’ve just been fooling myself and other people.’ And that was the bloke who wrote Of Mice and Men, amongst other things.
Last night I felt this impostor syndrome in all its renewed glory on my way to the launch of my new book, Liquid Gold, at Waterstones in Islington.
Don’t get me wrong- I’m proud of Liquid Gold, really proud. I think it’s a nice story, reasonably well told, which has been skilfully edited and then given the gift of a stunning cover, and beautiful type setting. Everyone involved, me included, has done what they should have done, and it shows. I’d go so far as to say it’s a little gem.
No, it’s not the book that’s the problem, it’s me. I just don’t yet quite feel that I have yet earned the right to be standing here, wherever ‘here’ is. ‘Here’, for example, is standing up in a grown up city bookstore in front of 80 or so people and thanking ‘my agent’, even though I still have to pinch myself to think I have one. ‘Here’ is returning my publisher’s compliment about being ‘a delight to work with’; ‘here’ is explaining, without batting an eyelid, what lies behind the book, in the expectation that people will want to know. ‘Here’, until so recently, was another country, where they did things differently. When someone asks me what I do these days, I say ‘writer’, and I mean it, but I can’t help feeling that it’s still a bit of an assumption on my part.
But there is a huge difference between the callow eighteen-year old back there at Westbury and the sixty-year old in EC1. I’ve had six decades of experience of discovering that overconfidence is nearly always a mask for some deeper insecurity, and that questioning everything, including ourselves, is the way to go. Happiness is self-honesty, that’s all. When I say that I am surprised to be standing there, I absolutely mean it. I’ve worked hard to be here, harder than many people probably think, and I believe I deserve the chance.
It’s just that I sometimes can’t quite believe that I was given it.
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