I Had Every Reason to Believe in Myself. And I Still Did Not Know If I Was Ready.

When I opened the doors to Ebla Therapy, I had the MSW, the registration, and over fifteen years of sitting with women through some of the most tender, complicated, and sacred moments of their lives. I had built genuine relationships. I had developed a clinical lens shaped by real experience in real communities. I had a vision for what this practice could be that I believed in deeply, all the way down.

By every measure I could think of, I was prepared.

And then I opened the doors for real, and something I was not expecting happened. There was a voice that was quiet but persistent, the kind that does not announce itself loudly but just sits in the background and hums. What if nobody comes? What if I am better inside someone else's system? What if I built something and got it wrong? What if I am not actually as ready as I thought?

The credentials did not quiet it. The experience did not quiet it. The proof was sitting right there in front of me, and the fear was still louder.

I have since come to understand that this experience has a name. Imposter syndrome. But I want to be honest about the fact that for Black and Brown women, imposter syndrome carries a particular weight that is not always captured in the mainstream conversation about it. It is not just self-doubt in the ordinary sense. It is the residue of spending years, sometimes decades, in systems that quietly asked you to justify your presence, even when your work had already spoken clearly for itself. It is the accumulation of rooms where you were the only one who looked like you. Of having your competence questioned in ways your colleagues never experienced. Of having to work twice as hard for half the recognition, and somehow internalizing the message that you still were not quite enough.

When you step into something new, especially something you have built yourself, that conditioning does not simply switch off. You carry it into the very thing you worked so hard to create. And it whispers to you in the quiet moments.

What I understand now, looking back at those early days of building Ebla, is that the uncertainty I was carrying was not a sign that I had gotten something wrong. It was the weight of responsibility. The kind that only shows up when something matters deeply to you and you are genuinely committed to honouring it. The doubt was not evidence of inadequacy. It was evidence of how much I cared.

Feeling uncertain does not mean it is wrong. It often means it matters deeply enough to be scared of getting it wrong.

If you are in the early days of something right now, a business, a role you stepped into before you felt fully ready, a decision that feels bigger than your current confidence can hold, I want you to hold onto something. Uncertainty is not a stop sign. It is a sign that you are engaged, that you care, and that you are doing something real. The people who need what you are offering will find their way to you. And you do not have to feel confident one hundred percent of the time to keep going.

For many Black women and women of colour, the work of learning to trust ourselves is inseparable from the work of untangling what our environments have told us about our worth. This is something we work through together in therapy. Separating the inherited doubt from the truth of who you actually are. Learning to hear your own voice more clearly than the voices that told you to shrink.

Imposter syndrome does not get the final word. You do.