Imposter Syndrome

I recently posted a few Fibonacci poems. A colleague calls them “mathematical haikus,” which I found amusing. I received quite a bit of praise for them, and some even suggested that I publish them, officially, and not just on social media.

The idea did seem good. I actually considered it.

Then I remembered that I am not a poet.

I am not even a “poetess,” as myLabs Ayesha now calls me. 😅

And suddenly, I felt like an imposter.

It is funny how praise can sometimes make you more uncomfortable than criticism. When someone tells you that you did something badly, you can disagree, defend yourself, improve, or simply move on. But when someone tells you that you did something well, especially something you never claimed to be good at, you begin to wonder whether they have mistaken you for someone else.

I have always had a good command of the English language. But I have never thought of myself as a writer, much less a poet. My fascination with language goes much further back than that. Even as a child, I was fascinated by how people communicate: how we use words, gestures, expressions, tone, pauses, and even silence to make ourselves understood.

Communication has always interested me because understanding another person is not as simple as exchanging words. Sometimes the words are clear and the meaning is not. Sometimes very little is said, yet somehow we understand.

Perhaps that is why mathematics eventually became another language for me. It has its own vocabulary and grammar, but it also has something I have always valued in language: precision. A mathematical statement is supposed to mean exactly what it says.

And perhaps that is why I enjoy these little poems.

I like the constraints. A Fibonacci poem gives me a fixed number of syllables for each line. There is no room to hide. A word that I like may have to be removed because it does not fit. A sentence may have to be rearranged until the thought becomes clearer. Sometimes, taking words away makes the idea stronger.

There is something very mathematical about that.

Then someone calls it a haiku, and I become cautious.

I have so much respect for the Japanese tradition of haiku that I hesitate to use the term simply because some of my poems follow a syllabic pattern. Haiku is not just 5–7–5. There is history behind it, and an aesthetic that I know I have not studied deeply enough to claim. Its beauty lies partly in how much can be held in so few words.

I would not want to mistake the structure for the tradition.

So perhaps what I write is better called mathematical poetry. Or Fibonacci poetry. Or simply poems that happen to have numbers involved.

That sounds safer.

But perhaps the larger issue is not what to call the poems. It is why I feel I need permission to write them at all.

I am used to definitions. Mathematics trained me that way. We define our terms, state our assumptions, establish our conditions, and prove our conclusions. There is comfort in knowing exactly what something is before we proceed.

Life is considerably less cooperative.

So is poetry.

A thought can arrive before I know what it is. A feeling can resist explanation. Sometimes a sentence becomes a poem simply because prose feels like too much space around it.

And sometimes the fewer words I use, the more honest they become.

Maybe I have been asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether I am a poet, perhaps I should ask whether the poem has done what I wanted it to do.

Did it communicate something I could not quite say in ordinary prose? Did it make someone pause? Did something that existed only in my head manage to cross the distance between me and another person?

If it did, perhaps that is enough.

I still do not know if I am a poet.

Maybe I do not need to know.

I spent years learning that a mathematical statement needs proof before it can be accepted as true. Perhaps writing is teaching me a different kind of humility: that not everything meaningful needs to be established before it can be offered.

So I will probably keep writing these little poems.

Not because I have finally decided that I am a poet.

But because, apparently, the words have started arriving.

And I have learned that when words arrive carrying something worth saying, sometimes the only honest thing to do is let them speak.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.