Maya Angelou once said “Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great. I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.” Imposter Syndrome (or, imposter phenomenon) is very real, and our brains are very tired. It can loosely be defined as the feeling and worry of being undeserved for that which one has achieved, received, earned, or even who one is. Many of us can perhaps relate, in varying degrees, to envisioning a life and a level of success within it, no matter what success may look like to us personally, and in turn achieving that which we have painstakingly striven for, only to find ourselves moving into a stage where we feel acutely undeserving of any single thing we have achieved – no matter what that may be.
The term imposter phenomenon was first coined by Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Dr. Suzanne A. Imes, within a 1978 article by the name of ‘The Imposter Phenomenon in High Achieving Women: Dynamics and Therapeutic Intervention’, and exploring it further we have learned more and more that this feeling of discomfort appears most particularly within women and even more so in women of colour. Whilst it doesn’t limit itself to gender when affecting people, it is quite difficult to feel as if one belongs, particularly in professional settings, when one has never been able to see themselves represented in these places – hence the result of this being a frequent state of mind present within the brains of minorities.
Let’s take Maureen Zappala, for instance, who was quite literally a rocket scientist for the US’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for 13 years during the 80s and 90s. She has been previously candid about her feelings when working there, emphasising that, “for years I thought NASA only hired me because they needed women. I felt under-qualified and in over my head. I worked long hours to try to prove myself. I was too afraid to ask for help because I thought if I’m really as smart as they think I am, I shouldn’t need the help, and I should be able to figure this out on my own”.
This being said, Imposter Syndrome does not only make its appearances within the self-doubt of rocket scientists, and can actually take a multitude of forms and worm its way into the brains of many, sometimes for seemingly the most harmless things, yet nonetheless being exceptionally taxing on one’s mental health. From not feeling as if one deserves an award at school for great work, to being utterly unable to digest compliments, questioning one’s own abilities takes its toll. Furthermore, since this is something that comes from within one’s own perception of their own abilities, it is actually very difficult, if not near impossible to convince a person to emerge from this mindset.
Nonetheless, there is hope, as ever, in the fact that many of us with Imposter Syndrome of differing degrees are not alone in our feelings. So often do people in an assortment of fields and at various stages of life feel as if they do not deserve to be where they are, nor do they deserve the figurative or real microphone that they have been handed, that this is, arguably, where the phrase ‘fake it till you make it’ becomes so popular – at the root of our collective fear of simply not deserving our own lives.
It would be so wonderfully uncomplicated if the solution lay in simply giving ourselves appropriate credit and consideration of what we deserve, but unfortunately the weight of feeling like an imposter within oneself is far greater than that, and the manner in which it has the potential to poison our lives even greater still. Therefore, to start with, perhaps it is enough to realise that we are not alone, and that so many of us question whether or not we are deserving of a job, a promotion, a relationship, an opportunity or even another human being’s time; and in realising we are not alone, perhaps we can take steps to believing in ourselves that much more, just as society needs to work on so many levels towards ensuring representation across the board, and creating spaces within which people feel self-assured and equal to their counterparts.
In the words of Neil Gaiman, “if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
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