Shame Observed - "Kaitlyn does not work to her full potential"

My deepest shame has always been this sense that I somehow wasn't good enough. But one thing I've always been great at is pretending. So my greatest fear has always been that other people knew that I was a fraud. I spent my whole life being the "best" at whatever I did, and if I couldn't be the best (or at least fake it well enough) then I probably just stopped trying. I had amazingly supportive parents who believed in everything I ever did, they showed up and encouraged me at everything I tried. This isn't somehow their fault. This is a fear that's been engrained in me for as long as I can remember- perhaps because of the pressure of growing up in the fishbowl that is being a pastor's kid? I'm sure family dynamics, birth order, and "public" life had something to do with it.

I distinctly remember reading my report card as a child - Reading 98, Math 96, Science 99, and so on. Comments - "Kaitlyn is not working to her full potential." There it is. Even just writing that sentence, the shame that followed still fills my heart 23 years later. My early elementary school teacher could never have known that I would carry those words over 2 decades later. Neither could the countless other teachers who made the very same comments about my achievements. Maybe they meant it as an encouragement, but I never understood why my best didn't feel good enough. It felt like my teachers could somehow see through me, they knew I was pretending. Pretending to be smart. Pretending to be capable. Just pretending.

This was my inner-dialogue for the majority of  my adolescence and early adulthood - "They all know you're a fraud."

As an undergrad I had a professor who took time to mentor me. I had found a topic of study I loved, that I was the only one in my family to study, and that I was genuinely good at. I felt confident as I wrote my thesis. I spent countless hours every week writing only to have Dr. Maness sit with me for a few more hours as he painstakingly edited my work. Never once did he make me feel like a fraud, never once did I feel like he was judging me or wondering whether I had "worked to my full potential."  In that year I felt like I was enough - not the best, but not a failure, just enough. It was because of him that I felt confident enough to jump into graduate school. I just knew that this is what I needed to do - I loved this area of study and I was good at it.

The first few years of my masters/PhD program were amazing. I made friends, I was challenged, I questioned a lot of what I knew about the world. I got a masters! Once the PhD work began I dove in, and as I did, the doubt started to creep back into the recesses of my mind. Even though I had a 3.8 GPA, I started to struggle with my confidence. I wondered what my committee thought about my work all the time. I was convinced they all knew I was full of it when I took my exams and gave an oral defense. They asked tough questions, I had answers. But later on, in the dark, I cringed at my responses. There it is. I had gone too far. I probably didn't belong here. And they all knew it.

At the same time, I began to struggle with my dissertation chair. Some might say that the internal issues were triggered by her treatment of me in classes, the way she thought nothing of belittling me or tearing my work apart as I stood in the light of the projector at the front of the class. I knew my chair wasn't quite right in the head, though, and so I always tried to just shake her comments off.

I had a baby shortly after I passed my dissertation prospectus defense. I continued to work on research through the semester of maternity leave and came back ready to write. But things were weird. I would e-mail chapters to my committee and they would send them back stating that my dissertation chair had disallowed them from reading and commenting until she thought I was "ready" - whatever that means. During my time away she had decided that the prospectus I passed was unreasonable, so I rewrote and re-defended. It felt like a punch to the gut but I knew I just needed to jump whatever hoops to earn the letters I wanted after my name. I kept reading, I kept writing.

One day, I sent a chapter out to my whole committee. I received an e-mail back that said "A***, This is what I was talking about. She's in complete denial. T****". My heart was in my throat and my face was burning. I didn't know whether I would cry or puke. An e-mail that I was never intended to see threw me into a tailspin. Suddenly, many other strange events made sense - namely that I was contacted to confirm a conference room reservation at school. The reservation said "Kaitlyn TeBordo Wood" and they assumed I had made it. As it turns out, it was my committee chair who called a meeting to discuss me (and apparently my state of denial).

After 5 years in the program without any issue, no bad grades, no concerns about my writing, my chair believed that I was unready to write a dissertation because my skill was not "up to par." "It's okay," she would later tell me, "maybe you should have just gone to Bible College.*"

That e-mail confirmed everything I ever feared - that I'm not enough. And what's worse? That everybody knows it. Kaitlyn does not work to her full potential.

I left my doctoral program within weeks of that awkward e-mail exchange. My entire life flipped upside down and has never really flipped back up again.

Despite knowing that my chair was a bit off her rocker, I took every word she uttered as truth. And I've carried that stone with me everywhere I go... Except that I didn't realize it until recently. Until someone asked me a direct question about my grad school experience a few weeks ago, I hadn't even noticed that I've spent the last 5 years in a spiral of shame that is overwhelming to admit out loud.

I want to write, but I won't. I'm certain that behind their screens every single person is thinking the same thing my committee chair never meant to say directly to me, "She's in denial. She can't do this. Maybe she should have just gone to Bible College."

I want to speak, but I stick to preaching with my congregation because they're safe to me. Because I'm convinced that walking "into the Stadium" as Brene Brown puts it will put me square in the middle of the harsh light that would reveal all of my failings.

So instead, I don't. I keep a running journal of all the things I want to write about. I keep a running note on my phone of all the videos I should make. I've spent years hiding. Afraid to get up from the floor my committee chair left me on, deciding it's safer if I just stay here.

I'm kind of tired of it. I'm tired of walking around worried about the criticism that others might have from the stands of the stadium. I'm tired of standing outside of the stadium waiting for someone to notice me, decide I'm good enough, and usher me back out into the ring. I'm tired of looking back and wondering "what if...".

I don't know what happens next. There's no happy or triumphant ending here. But I wonder if my elementary school teachers were prophetic or something, because when I look back at the last 5 years of my life I can confidently say that "Kaitlyn is not working to her full potential." Not because I don't *do* enough, Lord knows my schedule (and hands) are quite full, thank you. But because I have spent the last 5 years hiding outside of the arena, speaking to those safe people on the sidewalk, just to avoid the feeling I had when I received that e-mail.

I can't help but wonder what might happen if I dared to go back in.







* Please note that I have no issue with Bible College. LOL! It was just something that my Chair used to try to shame me because we were at a snobby research institution. ;) In fact, I go to "Bible College" now - I'm in seminary at Northeastern. :)