When The Wheels Come Off……Put Them Back On Again

Ever since I decided to become visible online with my photography 7 years ago, I have had the spectre of self-doubt (Imposter Syndrome) to contend with. Previous occurrences of self-doubt tended to be short lived and felt like a shallow wave of negative emotion that would suddenly lap over me, only to dissipate as quickly as it appeared.

As an introvert I have made a concerted effort to push myself out of my comfort zone to face down this feeling and my strategy has been to apply an approach similar to the one utilised when I was a member of the fire and rescue service, that being the setting of goals within a process of continuous development and improvement.

On those occasions where self-doubt has arisen in the past, I would take a look at where my photography had started and then compare it to where it was at the point of reflection and the goals that I had achieved along the way. For the past 4 years or so, this has been effective, and I have held my nemesis at bay during this time.

All this changed recently when I was away from home whilst I was on a family trip which also presented some opportunities to undertake some photography. During the 3rd day of my trip, my nemesis totally caught me off guard when I received some criticism about my photography. Unlike the previous occurrences, the feeling of self-doubt did not feel like a shallow wave of negative emotion this time, but one that could be best described as a tsunami.

When it hit me, I knew straight away this was different from previous occurrences as the feeling of negativity felt extremely powerful as it immediately created a barrier between me and my rational thinking. Within the first few hours, I began the process of withdrawal, the first step being taking my Instagram account offline. I then accessed my website settings and switched the website from public to private. During the night, unable to sleep peacefully and quell the negative feelings, I switched off my alarm, in effect cancelling the plans for my final morning’s photography outing.

I spent the final day of my trip camera free and walked about for a good 6 hours trying to reconcile the negative feelings with rational thinking but to no avail. At this point I held the view, it was time to walk away from photography for good and considered getting my camera, lenses and some other gear appraised online and sell up lock, stock and barrel.

My thought process at this point was that I could take up playing the keyboard and piano again, as I had done before my passion for photography was ignited. I then remined myself that as much as I enjoyed playing, my music reading skills were not the best and when I played, I sounded like a three-legged cat walking backwards over the keys at times, therefore I thought maybe a totally new pursuit would be a better option, whatever that might be.

Unable to quell the negativity I was feeling, on returning to my hotel, I went on to my Facebook account and removed myself from all the photography groups I participated in. This only left my own Facebook page itself to deal with, but feeling jaded, I decided to leave the deletion until I got home, as I thought it would be best to let friends and family know I was leaving and didn’t want to start the process whilst away from home. Little did I know at that time, this turned out to be a good decision.

Over the next 2 days, my process of withdrawal continued as every newsletter or photography email I was receiving, I went to the bottom of the page and clicked the unsubscribe link. I also requested deletion of my accounts from other photography sites, similar to the process of the right to be forgotten under the General Data Protection Regulation.

After arriving back in the UK and an overnight stay with family, I returned home after an 8-hour drive and instead of my usual routine of booting up my computer, downloading my images from my memory cards onto my storage devices, running a back up and cleaning my gear, I left everything within my back pack with no desire to even look at the raw files of those images I had captured over the course of the first 2 days.

By bedtime, my feelings about selling my gear had receded and with all photography connections bar one now broken, the thought of returning into the comfort of the introvert shell and pursuing photography purely on a private basis was now the option I was leaning towards.

The next day, I wakened early and went online to my Facebook page to start the process of breaking the final connection, to effectively turn the clock back to pre-20th December 2018 (the day I made my first online posting on Instagram). As I was having a final scroll through my feed, I stopped at a set of images that my good friend Mali Davies had posted, as the images and the title of Mali’s posting caught my attention.

The street photography images that Mali had captured were of a group of firefighters who had responded to an incident in the city (possibly Liverpool) and this immediately made me cast my mind back to my own days within the fire and rescue service. The sense of purpose when called out operationally always invoked a feeling of belonging, as you were part of a team, and as a member of that team, you looked out for each other.

The irony wasn’t lost on me at that moment, as after my retirement, I joined Mali’s Facebook group (Let’s Create) and it was Mali who I have credited in the past as having a major influence in drawing me out of my introvert shell and for the past 7 years I have made new connections during the course of my photography journey. Now, here I was, looking at an image of a life that I had left behind on retirement and was about to step away from what had been a big part of my life since retirement, in effect, I was about to slip into the gap in between.

As to the title of Mali’s post, this invoked my curiosity as it was entitled “Fighting Fire Without Fire” and was a phrase I hadn’t come across before unlike the phrase “Fighting Fire with Fire” which I had heard of. I decided to look it up online and the initial findings compelled me to research the concept further with the use of some AI models. I asked AI to discuss the phrase but this time within the context of dealing with Imposter Syndrome as a photographer. The subsequent responses and the additional online references that AI signposted me to read was extremely insightful, almost mirror-like at times, as a good part of what I was reading was reflecting back towards me in terms of what I had been experiencing. It was also interesting to discover that some of the methods discussed in dealing with self-doubt were similar to the strategy I had been employing up until now.

During this trip down the rabbit hole, one context I came across in dealing with self-doubt was relatable to the basics of firefighting. The triangle of fire consists of Heat, Fuel & Oxygen and if you remove of one these elements, you in theory, extinguish the fire. In the case of self-doubt, inner anxiety serves as the fuel that enables self-doubt to burn if given the chance, so if you can keep the inner anxiety at bay, you are in effect starving the source of fuel, thus inhibiting the fire of self-doubt.

I also came across several similar statements that inferred “Fighting without fire” meant valuing incremental progress and to ground your confidence in observable progress not emotion and importantly, not to measure your worth against external benchmarks. In consideration of this statement further, I contended, it was also important not to let those external benchmarks determine your worth, as the risk is, if that worth is deemed to be zero, then it’s open season for self-doubt to establish itself and blind you to the progress you have made.

The final statement that really drove the message home was that self-doubt often thrives on silence and perpetuates the feeling of isolation and the way to combat this was to find community over isolation. Once again, my thoughts returned to Mali’s image and about the community that I once was part of (the fire and rescue service), which I knew, I could no longer return to. I then thought about the community I had been part of through my photography and that’s when my rational thinking started to become active again and I realised that I had the option to embrace community over isolation, so I elected to choose the former, not the latter. At this point I could feel the negative emotions begin to drain away and over the course of the day, clarity returned to my thinking.

I went to bed that evening feeling more at peace with myself and the next day following a decent sleep, I commenced the process of restoration. Over the course of the day, I switched my website back to public viewing, re-enabled my Instagram account and rejoined most of the Facebook groups I was previously connected to. I also resubscribed to many of the newsletters I had abruptly stopped a few days earlier.

I didn’t fully restore everything I was connected to previously, as after undertaking one final piece of self-reflection, I felt that my direction of travel had perhaps veered off from its intended course slightly. I therefore decided rather than just carrying on as before, I should perhaps take this opportunity to make some adjustments to enable my photography to evolve further.

As with previous years, I’ve thought about the year ahead and what I want to achieve and have now devised some new objectives which is centred around the theme of “Investment”, in particular knowledge, experiences and people. I have already commenced that process and look forward to pursuing this objective further over the course of 2026 and beyond.

If all goes to plan then hopefully the spectre of Imposter Syndrome will end up like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of The Lost Ark, locked up, never to be seen again and kept well out the way to cause any further damage in the future.

In concluding this blog, I want to extend my thanks to my good friend Mali, who unbeknown to him, has once again made a positive impact on me and ended up being a firefighter himself as his image helped create a much needed fire-break to give me the time and space to think rationally once again.

I also want to thank Les for noticing my absence and to Martin for reaching out and a final thanks to Vincent for the kind words of support too, each of you embody what the spirit of community means to me.