I think the title of this episode sort of says it all.. Do you ever feel like a fraud? And I’m pretty sure I know the answer. For almost everyone that answer is going to be yes. Because there has been a time at some point in our lives where we felt like a fraud. An imposter. Total fake.

Maybe it was at work. Maybe it was hanging out with the cool kids. Maybe it was at a school meeting or giving advice to a friend. That sense of doubt has a tendency to sneak in on all of us at some point or another, even if we are super successful or seem to have it all together.

This morning I got up, completely drained and completely exhausted from being up with the kids a million times through the night and because the cat decided that 4am was a great time to attack my feet. Michael was gone for work already so I got up at the last possible second and got the kids out the door to school, before coming home and climbing back in bed for a quick nap that turned into a nap with an extra hour and change of hitting the snooze button cause I just didn’t want to get up.

In those moments of trying to convince myself to get out of bed and get started on the day, I felt like a fraud and a failure, which is ridiculous because there is zero reason I shouldn’t have gone back to bed to refresh and have a better jump on the day, but it is SO easy to feel like we need to be perfect. To criticize ourselves or beat ourselves up for every little thing.

I could look at the morning and think “geez, I give out parenting advice on the regular and here I am on a school morning asking my 8 year old to get the 5 year old cereal and help her get dressed and make sure his brothers are up too because I want to hit snooze one more time” Which honestly, if it were every day wouldn’t be ideal, but truthfully, because its NOT every day, he probably felt really proud that he could help Mom out and contribute in such a big way. It probably gave him a sense of significance and just isn’t that big of a deal.

Its THAT easy for it to start though. It can be the littlest action or thought that leads people to question everything, and for some it can be paralyzing. They don’t move, they don’t change anything because they feel like people will find them out. Obviously the simplest answer is just to be completely authentic, and not present any kind of façade or front, show people just as many of your imperfections as what you would want them to see and accept your entire self, for who you really are… but what about when you doubt even the things you are really and truly good at?

Last summer I had a client show up for a maternity session, and she brought her bestie along to the appointment. As soon as they walked in the door I felt like I knew the friend. Maybe not in real life, more like she reminded me of someone, or looked and sounded just like a celebrity. Of course since I pay very little attention to the celebrity world and am pretty terrible with names and faces, I couldn’t peg exactly who it was, but I figured it would probably come to me in the middle of the night, at which point I would email my client and prove just how much they looked alike. We joked that she must have a celebrity doppleganger, and that we should take a picture of her and run it through a similar image search on google to see who came up, and then moved on to creating the maternity portraits for my stunning client. I feel like its important to note that this client was just gorgeous. She knew her angles, her body was incredible and she made my job of creating stunning portraits super easy – this will be relevant later in the story. About half way through the session is dawned on me who this girl looked like, but of course, being terrible with pop culture I still couldn’t remember the name of the actress, the show (actually I remembered it as a movie) or even the name of the character she played, but I described the show and my client was pretty quick to pick up on which one I was talking abou