There’s nothing quite as annoying as dealing with impostor syndrome. If I could describe it in any way, it would be something like this: you know you can do the thing. You’ve successfully done the thing multiple times and other people also consider you a skilled person at doing things. But one day, out of nowhere you wake up with an immense doubt of whether you can actually do the thing you are already doing right now. Maybe you’re not good enough? Maybe someone else can do it better? You know it’s not a race and everyone has their own skills and ways of doing things, but still something just won’t let you have the satisfaction of knowing you’re ever good enough.
That for me is impostor syndrome. To be honest, I feel like I’ve had it all my life, but most recently I felt it when my anxiety spiked and I was working as a copywriter in the Netherlands. Yes, previously I had also felt like a huge impostor, but now I felt like there was so much I didn’t know and couldn’t do. Mind you, this was already 2 years into me actually doing the job and it was intense to consider that I may not be so good at it. To be fair, everyone was super happy with my work. My clients were constantly bombarding my managers with positive feedback and on their end, they were trying to make me less liked since it affected other people’s prospects with these specific clients.
Sure enough though, my inner critic would just not let me have even as much as an ounce of satisfaction from my work. Every time I did something nice and got a lot of praise for it, my immediate reply would be “Oh, I can do better”. And yes, that was true. Indeed, I could do better but at the same time it wasn’t necessary to always compete with myself. And it still isn’t. Rather than shrugging off my accomplishments like they were no big deal, maybe I could just decide to accept them. But see, this is where the issue appears. If I would accept praise instead of using it to fuel my inner criticism even more, it would contradict with what my inner artist judge thought about me. And oh boy, was that opinion not the very best.
In fact, when I did some more digging, I found out that my inner critic was very intense in their judgement of all of my abilities. Not only did I not give myself a break, but it was very difficult to meet any of my extremely high standards. I would hardly ever praise myself, but always felt like I needed to be better. And even if there were clear signs that I was currently on top of the creative food chain, it was my self-doubt that put me back down to “I don’t believe that I can” land, which in turn made me incredibly suceptable to failure. Because the thing about success vs failure is that if you don’t believe enough in yourself, you will never be able to succeed ‘successfully’ or in other words, believe in your success.
The saddest thing about impostor syndrome is that other people, often people who don’t even like us, often believe a lot more in our potential than we, ourselves do. When you think about it, it’s just a bit creepy. The thing is, other people can clearly see our value without the blinds that we put on ourselves. With said blinds, we forget about our potential and even try to ignore it to seem like we’re humble enough to be liked. However, it doesn’t matter if we’re humble or not, because other people (especially those threatened by our success) can very well see everything we’re trying to hide for them with such vigour. At the end of the day, they still end up disliking us and we end up thinking they do so because we’re not good enough, while it’s exactly the opposite.
When it comes to me, I know exactly where my ‘humblitude’ came from — my mother. While my father had the habit of making me think I’m better, she had the habit of humbling me down because god forbid, I have high self-esteem. Then everyone would think I’m egotistic and I would certainly make a fool of myself by having confidence. Well, life played that one right, because eventually people still disliked me. No matter how hard my mom tried, people still thought I have a super huge ego and supercharged confidence. But do you want to know the funniest part of them all? I didn’t actually. So everytime people would tell me my ego was huge or I was too confident, I would become more insecure until eventually everything crumbled.
To me, I was the imposter. Not a cool kid for sure, if anything — I was quite nerdy. But my looks didn’t say it. No matter how people looked at me, how many compliments I got or how great I was doing at something, I always thought I was failing. Until I realised it — maybe I am! But that’s okay. The thing is, nobody knows 100% of everything. There’s always some things that we miss. We do the best we can for a given time and we can keep doing it to practise and get better, until eventually we become amazing at whatever we want to do. But even then, we’re still not safe from the impostor syndrome monster. Everything just jumps up a level and there we are again, trying our best to be the best we can be while we hold on strongly with the hope to never, ever embarace ourselves by failing.
The thing about failure is, it confirms our internal bias. We think that we’re not good enough, then we fail and then we know we’re not good enough and it takes a lot more courage to try anything. What I’m trying to battle right now is the idea that failure is bad and something that I should be ashamed of. But it isn’t and I shouldn’t be ashamed of myself for trying, because every attempt just makes me better. But the thing is, this isn’t what I learnt in school. In fact, back then I learnt that failure would make you a laughingstock. If you couldn’t recite something they taught you off the top of your mind everyone in class would make fun of you for ‘being stupid’. Mind you, the ability to recite someting word-for-word does not make you intelligent but who are they to know.
At the end of the day, it’s good to rethink those early childhood memories and the things that our parents put on us as proper etiquette and normal behaviour. At the end of the day, we don’t need to battle our minds but to rather believe in ourselves and be happy with everything we achieve. I am still battling a lot with impostor syndrome and am certain that at the end of the day, I will prosper over it. The best thing to remember is there wouldn’t be any laughing children at the end of this road. Yes, there might be some people who still think they’re in high school, but if we ignore them we will know that the threat of failure is better than the threat of never trying anything at all.
Yes, I do say that a lot but at the end of the day, it’s important to believe in ourselves. In their efforts to protect us, our parents often miss out on opportunities to engrain in us proper self-esteem. The idea that we can like ourselves or be confident and belive in ourselves without actually being an embarassment. Who even came up with the idea that confidence is embarassing in the first place? It’s a bit ridiculous and way beyond its time. There was a time when all I wanted to do was fail and honestly, fail I did. In the end, it made me better for knowing that I can only make an ass of myself as much as I allow myself to feel like an ass in the process. Also, the best way to shut up my inner critic is to just scream “no!” in its face and know that everything will be for the better. Because you know what? Maybe it will.
I can do a more concrete article on how exactly to deal with impostor syndrome, but to be honest, I don’t really know the specifics of this yet. For now, it’s still unclear whether there will be any ways to fix this or if I’m just doomed to stick with it forever. Maybe it’s just a little voice in my head that’s trying to keep me busy and distracted from achieving my goals for fear of… success? Who even knows. The best I can do for myself is ignore it and do the scary stuff anyways. At the end of the day, even if people laugh or think it’s cringe, it’s still going to be interesting to live as the version of myself who was cringe, who did fail in the public’s perspective. Because who even is the public to judge? And who is my inner critic (or my mother in fact) to know exactly what people would think? It just doesn’t matter.
But I know one thing for a fact — there is no better version of me than the one who does and will do all of the things I’m so deadly afraid of. At the end of the day, I know that I will be grateful for being so independent and awesome, and it’s that kind of fun that makes me look forward to being alive. In fact, it’s that kind of fun that makes life worth living in the first place and then there are these critics, spearheaded by my inner one, trying to take it away. No, sir, I say to that. Let’s be for real and have some fun in our lifetime. Because you know what? Those haters, living covered in insecurities and doubts, are probably not having as much fun as us weird, cringy folks to begin with. And that’s that about that.
Love, Alex
PS: Go get yourself embarassed.
