I’m pretty much also in the boat so thanks for writing out a lot of what I was already thinking, lol.

I absolutely do have some imposter syndrome but what I’ve chosen to do about it is be completely open with others about having it (I don’t advise this if you’re a doctor or something like that, I’m in a creative-and-thereby-totally-subjective field). I found that being open about it or anxieties has in turn made others more open in turn, and it’s made the nagging voice in the back of my head a lot quieter.

My best advice for you OP is to learn to really, truly forgive yourself. For little blunders or whatever else, learning to not beat myself up over mistakes or embarrassment was life-changing in terms of being able to curate a sunnier attitude toward my own self.

I haven’t experienced it (yet) but I saw comments yesterday talking about downvote bombers. Definitely not your imagination.

Yup, that’s the one!

Lordy this one is so specific I’ll probably doxx myself with it, lol.

Small town college in a pretty red (enough) state, one store in town to buy any groceries unless you have a car and can get to the bigger stores in the next town. Black kid gets tackled fleeing the shop by the son of the shop owners, initial wave of gossip blames racial profiling by the white owners and the students start boycotting the business. College itself gets involved and stops purchasing food for the dining halls (baked goods, etc.) from the shop, severely cutting into their business margins. Turns out the kid was actually shoplifting, and if I remember correctly was shoplifting alcohol while underage, and it becomes a huge fiasco (as if it wasn’t already) with the police getting involved and I think the business sued the college. Not positive how it ended as it mostly happened right when I was graduating.

There were news articles about it online as it got to be a pretty huge deal with the lawsuits and everything. Partly posting this to see how many other people from there at that time are on here (I suspect more than a few).

Edited to add - turns out there’s an entire wikipedia article about this, so have fun anyone who searches for this lmao.