LinkedIn Post: The In-Between

Source: NSFW Podcast ep. 126 — "Think Globally, Act Locally" with Alissa Vierra (episode-126-think-globally-act-locally-with-alissa-vierra.txt; the "impostor syndrome on both ends" and make-it-accessible passages)

Topic: Being caught between two worlds, and translation as the actual work

A friend of mine was a first-generation college student. She told me once that the farther she got, the less she fit anywhere.

You start reading and thinking a certain way and home stops being easy. You go back and you can't talk to your family the way you used to without them looking at you funny. Then you go back to school and it's the same thing in the other direction, like everybody else knew something you didn't. She called it impostor syndrome on both ends.

What got her through it was deciding what the reading was for. She wanted to take what she'd learned and make it understandable to the people who needed it, the ones who were never going to sit in the classroom it came from. That became the work.

I know that in-between because I spend most of my time there. The people I work with, venue owners and restaurant people, are smart about their own businesses and completely done with jargon about SEO and platforms and funnels. The job is translation. Take a thing that's been made needlessly complicated and put it in words that make sense to somebody standing behind a bar.

Most people think the in-between means you don't belong anywhere. I think it means you can talk to both sides, and that's the rare part.

If you're caught between two worlds and it feels uncomfortable, that's probably not the problem. That's the skill.

draft from corpus — based on NSFW Podcast ep. 126