Maybe I'm not an impostor after all

I'll wager that 80-100% of the women reading this will immediately know what I mean when I talk about feeling like an "impostor". For the rest of you, it goes something like this:

When I first started off traveling, I'd hear some other backpacker's story about how they managed to hitch a free ride on a helicopter to the top of some random mountain where they then had to wrestle a wild boar before kayaking to a remote island where where they lived for a month, etc. and I'd think "I could never do something like that. My adventures will only ever be watered down compared to theirs. I'm not a REAL traveler (whatever that is) I'm just a fake, etc"... All this internal dialog despite the fact that I had recently bought a one way ticket to the adventure capital of the world after quitting my job and my comfortable young urban working professional lifestyle to gallivant around the world. 

Does this dialog sound familiar in the context of your own life? 

Have you ever gotten the job offer and thought, well, I didn't really deserve that (even though you did). Or wanted to ask for a promotion, but didn't because maybe your efficiency-boosting contributions weren't really that great (even though they were)? 

It seems that with traveling as with many other things I've ever done, I have figured out a way to justify why my accomplishments didn't count. But I'm beginning to suspect (in part thanks to Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In which recently brought my awareness to the topic) that maybe I'm a real traveler after all. Maybe I'm a legitimately adventurous person and it wouldn't be too presumptuous to claim this about myself.

This revolutionary possibility occurred to me while sitting in the back of a mail truck where I was being illegally transported from my farm labor job (which I happened upon because I met a guy who knew a guy who made some phone calls to a friend). I was sitting on a cooler next to a pile of newspapers and I cut my finger on a saw that was sticking up (What was it doing there?). My finger began to bleed, and I reached into my pack and deftly whipped out a band-aid which I had placed in a convenient location and solved the problem in about 10 seconds without too much concern as I listened to the 19 year old dutch national sailing champion (also hitching a ride) entertain the driver with her funny travel stories: she and a guy hitched a ride with an off-duty police officer who took the beach instead of the road and who happened to have sand boards in the back of his cruiser, so she spent her day playing in the waves with the cop and his friends. I thought to myself, "Oh yeah, that's the sort of thing that might happen to me". 

At the next stop, we helped the mail man sort and carry the packages and I began to marvel over my own adventures of the past few days. Like the time I managed to snag a free helicopter ride to the top of a glacier after partying with the locals. 

Or like the time I crossed a river by dangling from a 100 m stretch of cable all by myself. I'd gotten up so early that I was on the tramping track just before sunrise. The glow worms were still sparkling at me across the first few creek crossings. I loaded my pack and myself onto the cable car, attached only by a small pulley and allowed gravity to pull me to the center of the cable in what felt like a free fall. From the middle of the river, I could see the sun beginning to crest over the snow-capped peaks, so I stopped to "hang out" there for 20 minutes to watch the sunrise reflect pink against the roaring river below me. Elated, I pushed on, using a small lever against the cable to pull the cart along. As I got to the high side of the cable, I was just barely able to pull my own weight. In the last 10 meters, the car grew so heavy I was pushing with my legs and all my strength. But when I got to the platform, I couldn't hold the weight of the cart with one hand in order to steady the cart to jump out before the cart rolled back to the middle of the cable. All my hard work was lost as the cart flew back down the cable with me and my pack still inside. I would have to attempt it again. But this time I had to do it with fatigued arms. I knew I'd had the strength to do it once, and maybe twice. But I also knew I didn't have the strength to pull myself up a third time. So either I was going to get up on the platform on this attempt, or I was going to sit in the middle of the river until someone found me. And it could be days before someone found me. My friends on the farm would come looking for me if I didn't make it back that night. But by the time they realized I wasn't back, they would have to wait until morning to come looking for me. I had an emergency response beacon I could have activated, yes. But a helicopter rescue could still take up to 12 hours and I didn't want to sit there for that long. I was the only one out there. I was a good 5-6 hour walk from another human being in any direction.  So I HAD to do it. And it was because I HAD to that I DID. If I'd even so much as suspected that there was another human being out there within a few hours of me, I wouldn't have been able to muster the strength to get across that wire. I went into hyper athlete-focus mode and was literally yelling out loud to myself , "DO IT! DO IT! YOU CAN DO IT!" and I just barely did it. I just made it with a foot on the solid platform and collected my pack before the cart went barreling back down the cable. I stood there shaking on the platform buzzing with adrenaline and practically jumping up and down with excitement that I made it. After that, I got to slowly come down from my high skipping down the river watching the sun rise over the next mountain peak and the next with perfect light so that every puddle reflected beauty. With music pumping in my headphones, I was perfectly happy: with no divergence between where I was and where I wanted to be and no disparity between who I was and who I wanted to be. Several hours later, I made it to the natural hot pools and soaked away the fatigue and adrenaline residue. So maybe I'm not an impostor after all.

After 12 hours of mail truck-riding and hitch hiking I arrived at my destination (a friends apartment who I'd met earlier on the gondola of the downhill mountain bike slopes) only to discover that I was locked out for the night (because I had forgotten to message about what day I was arriving) and my first reaction to this realization was, "oh well, I'll go to the pub and get a burger and beer and figure it out later". Figuring it out later meant camping in her yard (I even cooked oatmeal for breakfast out there in the morning. I had everything I needed in my pack, after all). So now I'm beginning to think, "maybe I'm not an impostor after all". 

What is it that you are discounting about your skills? Do you think you count? If I've gotten this far thinking that I was a fraud when it came to adventure, maybe you're not an impostor at whatever it is you are doing, either.

Maybe you're not an impostor.