Someone in the almost-empty bus must have been peeling oranges for breakfast, now I am floating in the tangy, citrusy smell. I am deeply grateful to this stranger for an unexpected olfactory treat. Also, thinking of maybe adding oranges to the grocery list.

I’m thinking about the recent flare-up of my impostor syndrome, how it came up on a week choke-full of events, complete with getting elected to a board and sending in my last assignment for the intercultural leadership course. How although everything feels like too much, I never feel like enough.

I am thinking about my generation. Not all of it, my generation of Ukrainians, specifically. When I entered the university, independent Ukraine was only five years old. I’m thinking of what it meant for a nation to become a country for the first time in its history and how many hopes were placed on us – the first generation that came of age in the independent country. I was among the first who obtained higher education in Ukrainian. We didn’t have textbooks yet and we refused to use the old Soviet textbooks printed in Russian and choke-full of communist propaganda. We had a student government. I was part of it, although I did not understand the significance at the moment. We felt free. We felt special.

I believe that my imposter syndrome has a lot to do with this expansive, overwhelming promise of my youth. With the time when we wanted to forget the past and erase the trauma and start from the blank page. Of course, the page was not blank, but we managed. We wrote something new and different on it. My imposter syndrome flares up to ask me if I’ve lived up to this promise. You could have been so much more, it says. I was never taught to be who I am, only to be more, always more. Maybe, that’s the problem.