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.

Blessed Dissatisfaction

“I’d stay here, happy forever, playing games forever, and soon I’d forget my mom, and my quest, and maybe even my own name.”

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief (2005)

There’s a bit in the ninth book of Homer’s Odyssey where he tells the story of how he and his men once arrived on an island filled with people who subsisted on eating lotus flowers. Odysseus sends out two scouts and a herald to make an assessment of the place; contrary to usual, the inhabitants plot no violence against them, but only offer them to partake of their tasty floral food. Having done so, the three men lose any desire to report back to Odysseus or ever to leave the island at all. They forget all about going home – going home being kind of the entire point of the Odyssey, if you didn’t know – and prefer to stay where they are eating lotuses. In the end, Odysseus has to physically drag them kicking and screaming back to the boat.¹

 

Probably not that kind of lotus, actually. It was apparently more likely a kind of jujube.

In Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series – which I gather, as a Classicist, I’m really supposed to hold in contempt, but then I’ve never been very good at doing what Classicists are supposed to do, and I’m a big Percy Jackson fan – the island of the lotus-eaters is reimagined as a Las Vegas casino, which is so much fun to spend time in that time really does fly, and Percy is dismayed to find that what he thought was a few hours spent there was actually a few days.² In the only Asterix story to go from screen first to page second rather than vice versa, The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, the lotuses themselves are dispensed with, but the Isle of Pleasure is still a pretty obvious reworking of the trope, given that the whole of the challenge posed by that particular task is to not forget about progressing with the journey at hand and not stay on the island forever.³ In the final instalment of Lemony Snicket’s Series of Unfortunate Events, The End, the motif makes a yet less explicit appearance in the form of the island where the Baudelaires end up shipwrecked, run by a man called Ishmael who keeps his subjects drugged on coconut cordial so that they never have any desire to leave, or indeed to question his governance.⁴ But there’s a heck of a lot else going on in The End that I might want to write about at some point, so as far as the rest of this post is concerned, I’ll confine myself to the previous examples.

As far as the matter of plot is concerned, the point of the island of the lotus-eaters (or its reworked equivalent) is as an obstacle hindering the heroes from completing their quest. I mean, that’s the nature of a quest, really: they’d be a bit boring and not very epic if there was never anything getting in the way of the heroes’ pursuit of their goal. But the lotus-eaters are different to most obstacles in that they’re not, as Odysseus takes care to emphasise, plotting any violence against the questers. They’re different in that you can’t tell they’re an obstacle. They’re different in that, instead of barring your way to your goal, they make you stop caring about reaching it. They’re different in that instead of refusing to allow you to satisfy your ambitions, they just give you different ambitions instead – and satisfy those ones.

The lotus-eaters are satisfied. They’re perfectly content. They’re loving life. And yet it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain who isn’t drugged up on lotuses that this is not a desirable state in which to exist. When Odysseus’ men tasted the flowers, they lost any sense of duty to their friends, or of the greater purpose with which they were occupied, or of where they really belonged. Existence as a lotus-eater might be satisfying, but you’d be hard pressed to call it meaningful.

Odysseus had to forcibly remove his lotus-eating companions from the island in order for them to recover their sense of the bigger picture. Percy Jackson and Asterix, in their own versions of the encounter, aren’t so lucky as to have anyone to do that for them. What snaps Percy out of his trance is realising that the other patrons of the Lotus Casino, though of not dissimilar age to his preteenaged self, all hail from different time periods, outfits and slang to match, but haven’t the faintest idea that they’ve been there playing games for literally decades; he recovers his fellow-quester Annabeth’s attention by making her think about spiders, which she really hates. What persuades Asterix and Obelix to leave the Isle of Pleasure, on the other hand, is of a different nature. The conversation goes like this:

“And now you’ve seen our island, the isle you will never leave again,” says the High Priestess to Obelix. “Your lightest wish shall be our command, forever and ever. What would you like, bold warrior?”

“Some food,” is Obelix’s immediate answer.

“Some food?” The High Priestess is clearly taken aback, but after some minor protests composes herself and offers: “All right, we can provide nectar and ambrosia.”

“Nectar?” Obelix is not impressed. “No fear, no fear, oh no, none of that boring old stuff; I want a nice wild boar. Wild boar’s very tasty.”

“You call nectar and ambrosia boring?” echoes the High Priestess in disbelief. “But that is the food of the gods themselves! Well, are you gods, or aren’t you?”

“I suppose we may be gods, but we eat wild boar,” persists Obelix.

“But – but there aren’t any wild boars on this island,” responds the High Priestess helplessly.

“What? There aren’t any boars, and you expect me to stay with you for good? You must be off your head!” concludes Obelix.

 

A nice wild boar.

Obelix wasn’t satisfied with the Isle of Pleasure, because, for all its myriad charms, it couldn’t offer him the one thing he craved most of all. And so he left. That’s always what our heroes have to do when they encounter some iteration or other of lotus-eaters: they have to get the heck off that island and back to the real business at hand. But suppose for a moment that the real business at hand involved staying on the island – not just for the sake of it, to enjoy yourself like everybody else, but for some other, greater purpose. Suppose you saw behind the curtain to how thoroughly messed up the whole thing was, and knew that you’d never be able to get the things you really wanted here, and yet you had to stay anyway. Suppose you remembered that you wanted to go home, to reach the end of your quest, but the very nature of the quest was that it demanded your remaining where you were – however dissatisfied that might leave you.

Imagine Obelix having to stay on the Isle of Pleasure despite its wild boar deficit. Hard to conceive of I know, but I reckon he’d basically have two options as to how to go about it: either he could continue to pine after wild boar and forfeit any chance at all at contentment, or he could give up on that and learn to like nectar and ambrosia instead. It’s not as if he hasn’t been enjoying himself on the Isle of Pleasure; there’s a lot about it that he likes. Instead of putting up with the continued the frustration of his desires, he could allow prolongued exposure to his environment to foster in him a different set of desires – desires that that environment could satisfy. It’s hard work, after all, maintaining a longing for something one can’t have. It’s not an appealing task. It’s not fun. On the contrary, it’s profoundly dissatisfying.

But then, according to our Lord, there’s a blessing in being profoundly dissatisfed if that dissatisfaction results from a desire for righteousness.

Blessed are the poor in spirit, in that theirs is the kingdom of the heavens.

Blessed are the mourning, in that they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the gentle, in that they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are those hungry and thirsty for righteousness, in that they shall be fed.⁵

You can chop the Beatitudes quite neatly in half, I think:⁶ this is the first half, and its overall concern is with people who lack something and are aware of the fact. (The second half is more about how the designated ‘blessed’ relate to other people: the fact that it’s also four verses, with the last one pertaining to righteousness, is a large part of what leads me to make the division.) Blessed are those who can see how deficient they are in spiritual terms; blessed are those who lament what’s wrong with the world; blessed are those who are soft and lowly and vulnerable; blessed are those who harbour a desperation for a righteousness that hasn’t yet been fully manifested. Blessed are the dissatisfied.

One of the deficiencies, I think, of the ‘Christian hedonism’ model spearheaded by John Piper – God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him⁷ – is that, if portrayed without the necessary concern for nuance, it can ignore the fact that, by the very nature of the thing, to derive one’s greatest satisfaction from the kingdom of God and his righteousness is to derive one’s greatest satisfaction from something that one sort of doesn’t have yet. To place the source of one’s greatest desires in heaven is to forfeit any chance at contentment on earth. To be most satisfied in God whom we don’t yet see face to face is, in the present time, to be dissatisfied. And so the Christian life done right is a life of profound dissatisfaction. Not exactly an easy sell to anyone who’s acquired a taste for lotuses.

But still we’re to do our best to sell it. And here is the heart of that greater purpose that requires our continued presence on the island of our dissatisfaction: some people are content with their lotuses, with the pleasures of the present age, and don’t see the future homecoming they’re missing out on. When Percy Jackson and his companions managed to extricate themselves from the Lotus Casino, surely a pang of sorrow was warranted for the time-lapsed kids they left behind there? Percy and Annabeth had realised how meaningless it all was; they knew that there were things beyond this little world they were in that were of impossibly greater importance; they perceived what a sad and terrible thing it would be not to know that – but they didn’t tell anyone else before they ran.

Maybe they didn’t think anyone would believe them. Or care. But it had to be worth a shot, didn’t it? Plus, if they had stopped to tell anybody, their argument would definitely have been made more persuasive by their own dissatisfaction with all the joys and entrancements of the Lotus Casino: a total lack of regard for the things these kids were devoting all their time to would be a jolt, wouldn’t it, a compelling witness to the authenticity of the belief that more important things were to be found elsewhere. What are nectar and ambrosia to someone who really wants a nice wild boar? Let the world be taken aback at what you think is really important; let it marvel, and, God willing, let it come to see the truth of your perspective.

So live as one dissatisfied with the world and all it offers. Live as one whose profoundest satisfaction simply isn’t available on this island. Live as one who remembers, amid every variety of lotus on the market – money and fame and status and relationships and achievement and legacy and whatever else they’re trying to entice you with – that there’s a far greater purpose, a homecoming for the rescued people of God, that will be satisfying to a degree of perfection light years beyond what any of us could dream of in the present age. This is your quest, to love him and serve him and make him known, even on the island of the lotus-eaters: after all, you were one of them once, until he dragged you kicking and screaming to freedom.

Be dissatisfied. It’s not an appealing prospect, I grant you. It’s not fun. It’s not the kind of Christian life they sell you when they quote ‘life to the full’ and tell you everything’s a good gift to be enjoyed. It’s not easy. But the point is, brothers and sisters, that our Lord Jesus Christ calls it blessed.

Footnotes

¹ Here’s the story so you can check that I’m paraphrasing accurately: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0136%3Abook%3D9%3Acard%3D82.

² I’m not going to link to the relevant clip from the 2010 film based on the book, because the film is not good. I really liked it when I first saw it, but that was basically because I thought the concept was brilliant, and then I went and read the books and realised how much better they executed that brilliant concept. Why don’t you enjoy some beautiful artwork of the series’ major characters instead: http://rickriordan.com/characters/.

³ This one I will give you a clip for – or strictly speaking, I’ll give you the whole film, with thanks to the kind soul who uploaded it to YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOhRhq6Pr6g.

⁴ The Netflix adaptation is now fully available; I enjoyed it very much: https://www.netflix.com/title/80050008.

⁵ That’s Matthew 5, of course: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matt+5&version=ESVUK.

⁶ They’re called the Beatitudes because beatus (or beati in the plural) is Latin for ‘blessed’, and hence beatitudo means ‘blessedness’. But it would be a little unwieldy for the tongue to call them the Blessednesses.

⁷ A maxim I’m sure you’re familiar with from Desiring God: https://www.desiringgod.org/. I don’t disagree with it, just to be clear; it’s actually a really helpful approach. But every approach has its weaknesses, and this is Christian hedonism’s.

On Devon (Glorious Devon)

"When Adam and Eve were dispossessed

Of the garden, hard by heaven,

They planted another one down in the west:

'Twas Devon, 'twas Devon, glorious Devon."

Harold Boulton (words) and Edward German (music), 'Devon, Glorious Devon' (1905)

Would you ever guess that I live a few minutes' walk from the city centre and yet this is the view across from my house? My deficient photography skills are really not doing it justice.

How long do you have to live in a place before you can reasonably start to conceive of it as home?

We've hit midsummer once again, and I suppose by now I should have adjusted to the fact that this season swings around every year, and stopped marvelling quite so readily at the long light evenings and the clear blue skies and the shirtsleeves temperatures, but somehow I haven't. Perhaps I'm just not prepared to cheat myself out of the joy of it all. And what's extra joyous is how beautifully Devon sets off the advantages of this time of year. The rolling hills and the river, everything green and budding, and the sweeping coastlines and the clotted cream - words don't do justice; you'll simply have to come and stay with me sometime and see for yourself.

How long do you have to live in a place? I've been here six years now, and I wouldn't actually be at all sorry if I were to stay for the rest of my life. So can I start giving Exeter and Devon as the answer to the question of where I'm from yet? Or how long am I rather to remain shackled to the city in which I spent my childhood as my identified place of origin? I was back there a couple of weeks ago, and it was nice to visit, it really was - I'm finally starting to see the principle that absence makes the heart grow fonder take effect on that front - but to visit, there's the rub, not to reside. So how long before the place I've actually chosen to settle myself supersedes the place my parents happened to bring me up in as my true and acknowledged dwelling-place? How long before people stop asking me about when I'm going 'home', meaning my parents' house? How long before Devon becomes properly mine?

And with that sentiment, and the view across the river, in mind, I wrote a poem - not as good as Sir Harold Boulton's as quoted above, I'm afraid, but then, that would be rather a tall order to fill, wouldn't it?

O Darling Devon, would you claim me for your own now?

What you've become to me, East Anglia was not.

She grew me, granted, and I'm grateful, but I'm grown now:

I grew like Alice did, right out of what I'd got,

And it was in your skies I spread my newfound wingspan

When I emerged from the cocoon, a fragile thing,

And wet like paint, to see what I might be to England,

What she to me, now we were past first buds of spring.

O Darling Devon, by some stroke of luck, you met me,

Though, since I don't believe in luck, let's call it planned.

I was uncut, you shaped me; liquid, and you set me.

When I emerged as who I am, 'twas from your hand.

So when the patchwork hills blaze red with dying sunlight,

Or Exwick's lights across the river gleam like chrome,

And my heart's engulfed by fondness as by floodtide,

O Darling Devon, would you let me call you home?