Physician and public health professional Dr. Kemia Sarraf (“Dr. K”) with no regret shares with the world her experience with impostor syndrome through a video noting Women’s History Month in March.
Sarraf, CEO of the trauma-responsive coaching and consulting business Lodestar, shares her life’s mission and how at times she doesn’t feel “up to the task” in a video series posted on 1221 Photography’s Facebook page.
As owner of 1221 Photography, Zach Adams gets the first look at Sarraf’s vulnerability-made-public: her self-doubt and fear of being exposed as a “fraud,” despite her competence and success.
“You should feel like an impostor when you’re first learning how to save or heal another human being,” Sarraf says in the video. “That’s a big responsibility. If you don’t feel unequal to the task, you did not understand the assignment. You’re supposed to feel that way.
Video posting date: March 11, 2026
Summary: Andrewin-Stover says that as a mom she looks to the example of her late mother who endured struggles while a single mother of six children.
“I have two kids. I have a 5-year-old and a 3-year-old, and one of my kids struggles with anxiety and the other one struggles with anger,” Andrewin-Stover says in her video interview.
“A moment for me that changed was one day there was a meltdown going on. The house was chaotic. Everybody was just all over the place, super nervous, and I had that moment of frustration in me and then I looked at them and I recognized a lot of myself. And in that moment, I was able to calm down,” Andrewin-Stover says. “I was like, ‘Holy, holy crap. You are me. That is all me. I get to take this moment and choose to accept you just the way that you are and help you through this and not blame you or shame you or tell you just get over it. I get to be here for you,’ and then that changed a lot of things for me. A self-acceptance and self-love and also knowing that they’re never going be too much, not to me.”
“The assignment is probably bigger now than it’s ever been in my lifetime. I think what shifts when you get old, or older, I think what shifts is, you start to get right-sized in relation to the task … The very best thing that I can do is commit myself to the task that’s right in front of me.”
And for Sarraf, the task at the time was to engage with Adams for his video series highlighting women, giving them a voice.
Adams is a professional photographer who works as the digital media coordinator for Illinois Times and Springfield Business Journal in addition to having his own business. 1221 Photography’s Facebook page has featured the video stories of women in the community for each day in March 2025 and 2026.
“I was raised by a lot of women, so I have a big respect for women,” Adams says. “It seemed like women were being silenced more than usual, or maybe it was because I was just now paying more attention to it. … At first, it was just going to be pictures, but I’m like, ‘I feel like I can tell a better story or let them tell their stories if it were video.’”
Video posting date: March 11, 2025
Summary: Sarraf’s desire is to be a part of a force for healing in the world – to do good things and to take good care of other people.
“I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything other than be a doctor,” Sarraf says in the video. “When I finished my public health degree and then went on to medical school, I realized that those two fields were so inexorably entwined with each other. That we can’t take the patient out of the context. You are not ‘you’ by yourself. You are with all those people around you in the community and the environment that you’re in.”
The ‘impostor’
A question Adams poses to women he interviews for the video series is one that asks how they handle impostor syndrome.
Shatriya Smith, executive director of the Garvey Tubman Cultural Arts & Research Center in Springfield, says her impostor syndrome will never go away.
But that’s a good thing.
“Impostor syndrome and self-doubt are a big issue for me because I can convince myself that I am the problem and believe it,” Smith says in her video. “I’m just honest that I have that issue … and denounce the issue because right now, when you say I’m an impostor, I breathe through it and I get through the meeting or I get through the moment and then I sit in the car, and I might cry because of the fact that I feel like I shouldn’t be in that space.”
Smith calls someone to talk through her feelings.
“So that I can get it off my chest because most of the time my mental fear is mine, and if I speak it out loud, I can dispel any of those energies that falsely make me believe that’s true,” Smith says.
Empathetic photographer
Adams, 40, was true to himself when he pivoted from what he thought was his dream career.
Born and raised in Peoria, Adams moved to Springfield in 2008. He graduated from the dental assisting program at Midwest Technical Institute and then tried to find a job as a dental assistant.
“They’d say they were hiring, but when I showed up, it kind of seemed different,” Adams says. “I would show up, and they would be like, ‘We already interviewed everybody. Sorry to waste your time,’ and so after a couple of those, I’m just like, ‘Maybe it’s not for me.’”
Although he’s done photography all his life, Adams started his business’ Facebook page in 2018.
Adams worked at a dental lab, helping to make dentures and crowns. Eventually, he was a car detailer at car dealership and doing photography on the side when the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“Photography has always been the dream. I just didn’t see a way to make it happen until COVID,” Adams says. “When everything shut down, it gave me an opportunity to focus solely on photography, and from there, I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Illinois’ stay-at-home order due to COVID-19 took effect at 5 p.m. March 21, 2020.
“The Illinois State Museum was asking people to turn in pictures and art and poetry of what COVID looked like to them, so pretty much every day I turned in 20 or 30 pictures of just life – streets shut down, signs, parks closed,” Adams says. “I didn’t hear anything for maybe four or five months, and they contacted me, and they were like, ‘Hey, we want to give you your own exhibit from everything you turned in.’”
The Illinois State Museum’s “Journal of a Plague Year: Illinois in 2020” exhibition showcased submissions from its COVID-19 collecting initiative and featured Adams’ photography. Adams’ work is in “Illinois Digital Archives”: www.idaillinois.org/digital/collection/p16614coll64
“Most people found me from either the exhibit or there was a little girl who died of a rare cancer,” Adams says. “Her Make-A-Wish was to have a parade, and so her family asked me to document that because they didn’t know how long she had. A lot of people also know me from following her journey.”
Video posting date: March 20, 2025
Summary: Smith says she’s her own “hurdle” because she’s afraid of the future.
But trusting herself helps her overcome self-hurdles.
“My own insecurities. That’s the hurdle. That’s the biggest. People can put hurdles in front of you, and you will succeed them or leave them alone,” Smith says in her video interview. “The hurdles that you place in front of yourself are the most difficult because you have to climb those walls internally, mentally, emotionally.
“My hurdles are being afraid of the future. I have nothing to fear, but I am still afraid of the future. Trust yourself to know that you can overcome all of these, even the self-hurdles, but the self-hurdles are more recurring than the hurdles anyone else will put in front of you. My hurdle is Shatriya.”
Women’s journeys
Adams initiated his project for Women’s History Month in 2025 with friends, acquaintances and family, such as his daughter, Kinley Adams, who is now 10, and his fiancée Ashlyn Yates.
“It’s allowed me to see women differently, to hear their stories, to hear some of the things that they’ve been through, how they’ve persevered through it,” Adams says. “Some talk about sexual assault, dealing with stuff like that from men.”
After regular photography sessions with women and hearing their stories, Adams wanted to do something different “to lift women up.”
Powerful women highlighted include the late mother of social worker Chitaia Andrewin-Stover.
Andrewin-Stover says in her video interview that her late mother inspires her because she was a single mother of six children who persevered through life’s difficulties.
“Being a powerful woman to me is showing up for yourself and also showing up for other people,” Andrewin-Stover says in her video. “I don’t think you can wholly show up for yourself, and I don’t think you can wholly show up for other people. I think there needs to be some sort of balance between the two … It’s not a competition. It’s not this person pitted against that person. We have to work together for the common goal.”
Women in history “whose names no one knows” are the women Sarraf would have liked to have met.
“History is filled with the legacies of people whose names we will never know,” Sarraf says. “They were never written down. Not because what they did wasn’t important. Not because what they did didn’t change the trajectory. They just were right-sized. They were the small movers of the way things happened over time.”
Adams moved Sarraf out of her comfort zone, and for that, she is thankful.
“This is not the kind of thing I do. It’s not the kind of thing I like to do. I don’t,” Sarraf says about her video interview. “It was something I needed to do for a lot of different reasons, and so as I was talking about this project and this process and pushing myself to do something different and important … There is literally no one, other than Zach, I would do this with today.”
Tamara “Tammie” Browning is a freelance writer and reporter from Petersburg. She has a weekly newsletter “Mother Road Moves” on Substack that chronicles the people, places, things and happenings on Route 66 – from Illinois to California.
This article appears in Women’s Business Showcase.
Absolutely love this! Incredible project! We need more men who truly see and uplift women. Mr. Adams is doing such important work.