My fear of being seen online

I'm sometimes afraid to be seen online.

"Why," you ask, "would Brian fear being seen?"

Because I'm an imposter. I'm not really who I pretend to be. And I want to keep people from finding that out.

I've recently begun to ask myself where this fear came from. When did it start? What were the circumstances?

It began in late 2006 when I started working at Google.

I had been a techno-geek for over a decade. As a consulting engineer in the '90s and '00s, I thought I knew a lot about this new-fangled internet thing. I enjoyed helping small businesses stake their claim to a piece of virtual real estate.

I'd help them select and register a domain name, set up their DNS, email, and web servers, and build a functional website (though it would be considered crude by today's design standards). I built firewalls and kludged together programs (sometimes written from scratch) to make computers play nice together.

I was hot stuff. In the area of how the internet worked and how to build servers from Linux and open-source tools, I was usually the smartest person in the room. Sure, I would sometimes go to a tech conference and find people who could run circles around me, but those were rare occasions.

Then I saw a job listing on Craigslist.

I followed the link to a Google webpage, and, on a lark, uploaded my resume. I was curious about Google but did not imagine that they would talk to me past an initial screening interview.

After two telephone interviews, they flew me don't to Silicon Valley for six interviews in six hours.

Wow! The Google campus was a mind-blower. A spacecraft prototype hung from the visitor lobby. Volleyball courts. Ping pong tables. Arcade games. Free lunch. (Anyone who tells you that there's no such thing as a free lunch has never visited Google!) And Googlers commuted across campus on Googley-colored coaster bikes. This was SO COOL!

I flew back to Seattle that evening tired, amazed, and with little expectation that I'd hear much from them again. Everyone I had met was younger and smarter than I was. They had degrees in software engineering and computer science. (I had majored in naval architecture so I could design sailboats. And, I broke the university's ship simulation computer!)

Long story short: Google hired me. I spent two weeks in Mountain View getting indoctrinated, which was very much like drinking from a firehose. It was then that I started to realize that I was surrounded by geniuses. I kept my mouth shut and listened as best I could. I was even afraid to ask questions, fearing that I would expose my ignorance.

That went on for about 10 months until I got hit by a car while I was biking home.

Ask me sometime about how I woke up in a hospital, how I could barely string three thoughts together, how I was overwhelmed by conversations going on in the same room even though I was participating in only one of them.

In the weeks and months that followed, I learned "compensatory techniques" to help me work around my reduced short-term memory, to minimize distractions when working, to insist that no one else in the car talk while I'm driving.

I could function. I could even work at a computer---for a while.

I suffered "mental fatigue" after only a few hours. Fortunately, the Google office had quiet meditation rooms and nap nooks where I could retreat for 10 or 15 minutes to recover. And my team was super helpful and understanding.

But it was apparent that I wasn't the same hotshot internet technogeek that I had once been.

I found that I had built a lot of my identity and sense of worth around my ability to build servers and fix them. But that ability had been diminished. 

Could I keep up with my team? Would they figure out that I didn't know as much as they did? Would they cast me out of the village, leaving me to sleep in the Dark Forest? These worries reinforced the imposter syndrome that had plagued me since I started working at Google.

Things got better. I recovered some of my cognitive abilities. I wasn't as overwhelmed by sensory inputs, "noise" in my mind. I was able to pivot into technical leadership roles where I could bring a big picture perspective and be less focused on details. I was able to bring a systems engineering suite of skills to a customer support role. 

And I was able to pivot once more from building systems of circuits and silicon to developing systems of people and teams. That's where I found my next opportunity to spread my wings and soar.