Contemplating imposter syndrome
To say that you have it, you’d perhaps need to have the sneaking suspicion that you shouldn’t feel like an imposter. Otherwise it’s not imposter syndrome, you just know that you’re somehow getting away with something, or getting something you don’t deserve or that there’s no point trying. At that point it doesn’t feel like a syndrome, it feels like a truth. Therefore anything anyone has to say about imposter syndrome might not even register.
What do you do if you feel fraudulent? The odds are you’re trying to be or do something that matters to you and that you care about wholeheartedly, but you feel like you fall short of the real thing. You aren’t good enough, not authentic, haven’t been doing it long enough, don’t know enough and so on and so forth. To feel like you don’t make the grade you have to care a lot.
People don’t tend to get that insecure on their own. They get there because someone else has rubbished them at some point. Usually when they were too young for it to be an even slightly fair assessment of their potential. It’s not the case that you have to be magically gifted from the age of five to count as good enough. There’s nothing fraudulent about needing to learn, practice and develop. The people who demand instant perfection of you are not the ones who know enough to give informed feedback.
Pretty much anything you might consider doing can be worked on. Love and determination are actually worth far more than raw talent. If you’ve got talent and no will to work with it, you won’t get anywhere. Put in enough dedicated time over enough years and you can develop decent skills in pretty much anything. You might not be the best, but you absolutely can get to a place of being good enough if you’re physically capable of doing the thing and just keep putting in the time. If you love something enough to work at it, that will do.
I honestly think love is the most important thing. If you’re doing something because you love it then there’s absolutely no way you can be an imposter. It is love of the thing you do that defines you as a person authentically doing the thing. It’s the only measure that really counts. If you love writing, and you write, then you are a writer. If you’re doing something you don’t love, out of necessity or to prove a point or for some other unhappy reason, maybe that’s not who you really are and maybe that’s not being authentic. It’s ok to do what you need to do, it’s ok to resent having to do things that don’t speak to you – it’s not a great place to be, but it’s not something to beat yourself up over.
What I haven’t worked out yet is what to do if you feel fraudulent about being a person. What do you do when asking to be treated like a person feels like a scam, and going after something you aren’t entitled to? Again, I don’t think anyone gets here on their own, and having experiences that leave you feeling like you aren’t a proper person isn’t easy to come back from. Violated boundaries, loss of autonomy, loss of dignity and self determination will cause this, but seeing the mechanics of how it happened does not cause the result to change. Feelings of being a fraud are more easily tackled when it’s about things you do rather than fundamentally who you are, but perhaps there are ways through this.
