Impostor Syndrome 1: Consider This

Blackadder:    I then leapt on the opportunity to test you. I asked if he’d been to one of the great universities: Oxford, Cambridge, or Hull … You failed to spot that only two of those are great universities.

Melchett:         That’s right; Oxford’s a complete dump!

Blackadder:    Well, quite. No true Englishwoman could have fallen into that trap.

Blackadder Goes Forth E5, ‘General Hospital’ (1989)

I want to talk about impostor syndrome.

 

Nice excuse to have a cool-looking mask as the post cover picture.

I want to talk about how stupid and pointless it is, not so much because I personally think it’s stupid and pointless (though I do) as because I think we all of us know that it’s stupid and pointless, and yet somehow it persists among us even as we acknowledge the fact. I want to talk about it because I so often hear someone in an academic context mention how real and prevalent the thing is, and see her statement met with ubiquitous nods and knowing murmurs of agreement – and so it is revealed that we’re all sitting there believing ourselves impostors. I want to talk about it because I seem to recall that I to no negligible extent experienced it at one stage, but now I just sort of don’t that much any more, and so it seems reasonable to suppose that if I ramble about the matter for a while in light of my own experience, the resulting series of little treatises might possibly be of some help to any of you who hope to chart a similar course.

To provide a brief sketch of the necessary context, the idea of the impostor phenomenon was apparently introduced by Drs. Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes in a 1978 article dealing with high-achieving women.¹ The participants in the study, though all extremely competent and talented as far as the gatherable evidence went, attributed their successes to luck, and to other people imagining them to be more capable than they actually were. Someone with impostor syndrome, then, believes that she isn’t really good enough to have achieved as much as she has, and that the people around her are deceived to think that she is; she is persistently afraid of being exposed as a fraud. (The phenomenon has since been found by other studies to be common among men as well.)

Impostor syndrome is the voice that tells you that everyone else in the room undoubtedly knows heaps more about the subject at hand than you do, and you can’t possibly open your mouth to join the discussion because then they’ll all realise what an idiot you are. It’s the voice that tells you that that latest addition to the slew of first-class grades you’ve been accruing is just another fluke; the marker was generous, or you just so happened to hit on something he liked, or the rest of the cohort did badly and your own grade was moderated upwards by comparison, or whichever scenario it might be that you envision in order to deny the quite obvious truth that you’re pretty damn good at this. It’s also having got so used to being the cleverest kid in the class at primary school that, once you progress to university and beyond, anything less than that – first-class mark or not – still feels like failure, even though, logically, it should register with you that you’re moving into a smaller and smaller niche of extremely clever people, and being top of the one group is hardly comparable to being top of the other. Impostor syndrome is the knot of fear in your stomach when you get something wrong, because surely you’re only one more slip-up away from being exposed, and equally when you get something right, because every success only sets the precedent and the expectation more firmly and ramps up the pressure on you to continue to be lucky enough to meet it, or else compensate by working harder. It’s that desperate need to get everything right and do everything perfectly, because every mistake or deficiency, however small, demonstrates that you as a whole person are simply Not Good Enough. Impostor syndrome is being too afraid to ask for explanations when everyone starts talking with airy pretension about something you don’t understand, then rushing to claim your threatened place in the conversation by nodding sagely and talking with airy pretension as soon as it mercifully strays back onto territory you do understand.² It’s agonising over every word you speak or write lest you reveal yourself to be in some way less than your addressee imagined you were. It’s feeling personally wounded by constructive criticism, and resenting it, because you let negative comments about your work reach into your core perception of who you are in a way that you’d never come close to letting positive comments about it do. It’s knowing no way to receive a compliment other than by denying its veracity. It’s feeling guilty every time you get a better mark than your friend because you just don’t see how you deserve to.

Impostor syndrome is expecting perfection of yourself, and considering yourself a fraud undeserving of the position you hold whenever you fail to meet that impossible standard.

If you discern that in yourself at all, please take a moment to consider that the set of symptoms in question constitutes a distinct and recordable psychological phenomenon recognised by professionals in that field. Take a moment to consider also that the category has proved itself a relevant and helpful enough one to apply among the population at large to have worked its way firmly into mainstream discourse. Take a moment to consider, therefore, that a good proportion of the people in whose company you feel like an impostor, are feeling exactly the same way. Now take a moment, if you will, to consider how stupid and pointless that is.

I’ll delve deeper into particular aspects of impostor syndrome, and particularly how the gospel speaks to it, in my next couple of posts, but for now please take a moment to consider that if you feel like an impostor, you’re very much not the only one. And if, as it turns out, the room is full of self-perceiving impostors, who exactly is it that they’re all hoping to impress?³

Footnotes

¹ Here’s a more recent study summarising the salient points of the earlier research: https://www.tci-thaijo.org/index.php/IJBS/article/view/521/pdf.

² There’s an excellent bit in Miranda Hart’s Is It Just Me? where she suggests some strategies for coming across as intelligent in conversations you don’t understand: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Miranda-Hart/Is-It-Just-Me/14575608. See, as in so many things, it isn’t just you!

³ And before I go, a tip of the hat to Blackadder Scripts for helping me out with my opening quotation: http://allblackadderscripts.blogspot.com/2012/12/blackadder-iv-episode-5-general-hospital.html.