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Impostor syndrome

I don't have impostor syndrome about programming, advanced mathematics, or public speaking. I cheerfully stand up in rooms full of professional programmers and authoritatively tell them what I think they should do.

However, when I put up shelves in the bathroom back in May, I was a psychological mess. For every little thing that went wrong—and there were quite a lot—I got all stressed out and wondered why I dared to perform this task. The outcome was good, but I had a lot of stress getting there.

I put in one plexiglass shelf, for which I had bought heavy-duty wall anchors in case the kids leaned on it, and two metal shelves higher up, which came with their own screws and anchors.

Here's a partial list of things that worried me:

1. The two upper shelves came with a paper template that I held up to the wall to mark where the holes should be drilled. What if the two shelves were slightly different and their templates were different and I needed to use both templates on the wall instead of using the same template twice?
2. When I putting the heavy-duty wall anchors into the drywall, big divots of plaster fell out of the wall around the anchors.
3. Then I filled in the holes with filler, and got filler in the screw holes in the wall anchors, and stressed about this. What if the filler in the sockets somehow prevented the screws from going into the anchors or caused some other unforeseeable problem?
4. The filler looked sloppy and I worried that it would look absurdly ugly to everyone who came into the bathroom. (The shelf would have hidden the ugly screw job from a normal view, except that it was made of plexiglass, so the filled holes were visible through it.)
5. I didn't know how big to drill the holes for the smaller wall anchors and stressed about it, examining the wall anchor packaging for some hint. There was none.
6. I wanted to insert the wall anchors into the holes with my rubber mallet. Where the hell is it? Then I stressed about using a claw hammer instead and maybe squishing the anchors, and spent a while looking for a piece of wood or something to soften the hammer blows. Eventually I gave up looking, wondering if I was dooming the project.
7. I guessed how big to make the hole for the anchor, and was wrong; my hole was too small. I didn't realize this until I had the first anchor halfway in. Then I stressed that I might ruin it when I pulled it back out of the wall.
8. Then I stressed about the size of the holes again when I drilled larger holes. What if I make the hole too big, and then have to fill all the holes and re-measure and re-drill the whole thing?
9. The anchors didn't go into two of the holes. I needed to yank them back out, then redrill the holes, with the outer end a little messy, or the anchors wouldn't go all the way into the holes. Again I worried about spoiling the anchors.
10. When I drilled the holes, sometimes the drill suddenly went all the way into the wall and the rotating chuck left a circular scar on the paint.
11. Also, two of the holes didn't drill easily; I had to lean on the drill really hard to get it to go through. For a while I was concerned that there was some undrillable metal thing in the wall just where I wanted my hole, and I would have to fill in all the holes and remeasure and redrill the whole thing.
12. Even though I had marked the wall for the lower shelf by holding the shelf against the wall and then poking a pencil through the actual holes, when time came to put the bolts in place, I found that the two holes were slightly too far apart. Somehow this worked itself out.

On review, I see that several of these worries could have been completely avoided if I had had a supply of extra wall anchors.

Stuff that could have worried me but (rightly or wrongly) didn't:

1. I knew enough to go to the store to buy wall anchors and screws for the bottom shelf, which did not come with its own hardware. There are a lot of different kinds of anchors, and I did not worry too much that I was getting the wrong thing.

2. I was concerned (although not worried) that the screws holding the bottom shelf to the wall might stress the plastic too much and cause it to crack, either immediately or over time. Obvious solution: insert washers between the screw heads and the shelf. I went to the hardware store to get nylon washers; they didn't have any. So I got thin metal washers instead. I did not worry about this; I was sure (perhaps wrongly) that metal washers would do the job.

3. When I asked the hardware people for plastic washers, they looked totally blank. “Plastic... washers?” they asked, as if this were a heretofore unimaginable combination. I could have felt like an idiot, but instead I felt, correctly I think, that they were idiots.

4. For some reason, I was not even slightly worried about properly leveling the marks for the holes. I used a spirit level, which I consider pretty fancy.

5. I was careful not to over-tighten the screws holding the plexiglass shelf in place, so as to avoid cracking them, but I was at no time afraid that I would somehow crack them anyway.

[Added in July: I have reread this article for the first time. I can report that all the worries I had about whether the shelves would look good have come to nothing; they all look just fine and I had forgotten all the things I was afraid would look bad. But I really do need to buy a couple of boxes of plastic wall anchors so I can stop worrying about spoiling the four I have.]

[The shelves look crooked in the picture, but that is because I am holding the camera crooked; in real life they look great.]

[ A later visit to a better hardware store confirmed that plastic washers do exist, and I did not hallucinate them. The rubber mallet still has not come to light.]

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