I'm Not Less Than. I'm Different Than.

What a high-stakes table taught me about imposter syndrome, showing up as yourself, and trusting that's enough.

I sat on a board. And every time my name appeared on the meeting agenda, a quiet voice whispered that I shouldn't be there.

Most meetings were virtual and manageable. Behind a screen, in my own home, I could hold my own. But this meeting was different. I was flying to an in-person session with a dinner the night before. And the night before I boarded the plane, I prepared the way I always do when I feel out of my league.

I prayed to be impressive.

I asked God to help me add value to the room. What I didn't notice was that I had already decided what impressive looked like. I had already decided what value sounded like. I prayed my expectations to God. I didn't ask God His.

That distinction would take me until 1:30 in the morning the next night to understand.

The Table Where Everyone Spoke a Different Language

When I landed the doubt crept in before I even exited the airport. Just walking to get a bottle of water, the thought came fully formed: I'm not good enough for this.

I pulled up sermon notes I'd taken the Sunday before — a message on breath prayer and reframing expectations of yourself. The line I kept returning to: it takes courage to get to the end of yourself and let Him reshape your expectations to match His. I read it twice. Then I went to dinner anyway.

The conversation that night moved in statistics and systems. Big-picture frameworks. Policy language. And I kept showing up with personal stories.

When the table turned to higher education versus skilled trades, I shared that my husband attended a less-resourced school where the trade program was the only pathway actively recruiting — while I attended a well-resourced school where Princeton was just one of many universities that came through. Every time someone raised a topic I could meet with a story, I did.

I left deflated.

By the end of the night I had decided I hadn't added value because I was measuring my contribution against what I assumed everyone else valued. They were trafficking in data. I was trafficking in real stories. I went to bed convinced I had sounded unserious, and the voice that always whispers you don't belong here had a full case to make.

What 1:30 in the Morning Sounds Like

God doesn't always come on my timeline. He comes when I can no longer make my voice louder than His.

What I heard in the quiet was this: I still don't know if they thought I was unserious. They might have. But they now know about a person who didn't have access to multiple pathways because the system didn't value him or his school enough to share more opportunities with him.

That's what I brought to the room.

Every table talking about systems needs without asking who the systems are for. I had spent the whole dinner feeling like the wrong kind of smart — too personal, too story-driven, not data-fluent enough. But data without story is just abstraction. And abstraction doesn't change anything for the actual people sitting inside those systems.

I'm not less than the people who speak in statistics. I'm different than. And the difference is the contribution.

The Sermon I Almost Missed

Here's the part I keep marveling at.

I wasn't supposed to be in church that Sunday. Our original plan was for our whole family to fly together on Friday, and if that plan had held, I would have missed the sermon entirely. I would have walked into that dinner without the anchor I didn't yet know I needed.

But plans changed. My husband was anxious about flying home without me, and instead of brushing it off I let God soften my heart toward his discomfort. We adjusted. And in adjusting, I ended up exactly where I needed to be — sitting in that seat, receiving something I didn't know I was going to need three days later.

God rerouted my entire week through my husband's unease and my small willingness not to resist. He knew I was going to need that sermon before I knew I was going to need it.

What This Has to Do With Every Kid in Our Camps

I've thought a lot about why this experience keeps staying with me. And I think it's because the feeling I walked into that dinner with — I'm not the right kind of person for this room — is exactly what so many children carry into spaces where they feel like outsiders.

The work of Perfectly Me Hero Camps has always been about building the interior life of a child. Not just teaching values like resilience, empathy, and community-mindedness as concepts — but creating enough lived experience of those values that a child begins to trust what they bring to any room they enter.

Imposter syndrome doesn't begin in adulthood. It begins in the small moments when a child decides their voice doesn't count — when they measure themselves against a standard that was never built for them.

What I want for every camper is what I finally found at 1:30 in the morning: not the confidence to perform, but the courage to show up as themselves and trust that it's enough.

The prayer isn't to be impressive. The prayer is to let God reshape your expectations to match His.

And then to walk into the room anyway.