does anyone know if this is normal?

an ode to imposter syndrome

I’ve had the same journal since I was fifteen years old. It’s battered, quite literally falling apart at the seams and has survived a few spillages in its time but for the most part it’s still powering on, almost a decade later. It’s not something I use often, initially turning to it to scribble down occasional school-related rants or the frustrations of a teen who spent too much time in her own head. Over the years I found myself reaching for it whenever anything major was about to happen, using it almost like a time capsule, or a folio of letters to future versions of myself — though I rarely read back on what I’d written before for fear of death by cringe.

Recently, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to flick through, tracing back across so much life from the past ten years. Even though the subject matter was constantly changing and shifting it was sort of comforting to know that all those versions of me had made it through whatever the latest qualm they were discussing, for better or for worse. I found myself laughing over the overly dramatic ramblings of my seventeen-year-old self (sorry, past me), where flopping one of my university interviews was invariably the end of the world and totally a disaster (it wasn’t). The university years saw a similarly dramatic sense of doom in every entry, with each one seemingly just preceding or immediately after some sort of major assessment. Common themes were me thinking I’d failed, thinking I would fail or thinking I was a failure (I wasn’t), once again, hindsight is a wonderful thing. Some of the more recent entries grapple with career-related woes, the highs and the lows of starting a new job and the perpetual Sunday Scaries. This time, however, there’s no sage, wisened future version of myself to provide reassurance that it will all be okay because she, or should I say I (or we?) haven’t lived it yet. And that’s a terrifying prospect, it’s like the handbook on how to navigate your 20s ran out of ink mid-print and the rest of the pages are just empty, waiting to be filled by whatever lessons are unfortunately yet to be learned. But that’s besides the point. Something I picked up on through all ten years worth of musings was this persistent feeling of imposter syndrome, bleeding its way into every little aspect of my life like spilled ink through pages. It forced me to think about the last time I went into anything with even a scrap of confidence, and unsurprisingly, I couldn’t recall a single occasion. The thing is, I can’t pinpoint a singular moment or event that could have tripped the switch and turned off the bulb which powers self-belief but it’s apparently been fused for decades now.

Imposter syndrome is a funny little thing. There’s a weird sense of comfort in knowing that everyone experiences it at some point in their lives — but that very quickly loses its charm when it’s your standard operating procedure. It has no regard for how many accolades you chase or how many letters are after your name or how hard you worked to achieve them, it still manages to sink its claws into everything from work to play, an overly chatty demon on your shoulder determined to constantly remind you that you’re not good enough. And the worst part is I can’t seem to shake it free. I’ve tried every trick in the book — positive affirmations, meditation, trying to reshape my mindset through podcast after podcast but that feeling of sticking out like a sore thumb still persists. The gag of it all, however, is that eventually you become so good at masking the fact that you feel like you’re overwhelmingly under-qualified at everything you do that you start to project false confidence — “Of course I can help you with that! I definitely know what I’m doing and am totally not just putting on a façade to try to convince my own brain of that fact!” You also start to question whether you actually are a fraud, and wonder how long it’ll be until someone uncovers your schemes like some Scooby Doo villain being unveiled, accusatory fingers pointing out the fact that you don’t belong. Confused yet? Because I certainly am. It’s an exhausting, isolating and baffling way to exist.

I found myself wondering if this feeling was innate, rooted in something deeper and potentially stemming from this sense of not belonging anywhere. It’s something I’m sure many fellow first-generation immigrants can attest to — leaving behind everything you knew to make a new place your home, only to find that there’s always one piece of the puzzle which is not quite pushed in, while the place you used to call home also starts feeling foreign. I personally feel it most on occasions, I can’t recall the last time I spent a birthday with any member of my extended family, nor any major holidays for that matter purely because the 5,000 mile commute isn’t exactly conducive to that. I decided to look it up, to see whether there was any scientific rhyme or reason behind my theory and to my surprise it’s reasonably well documented in the literature that the imposter phenomenon tends to be observed more frequently in first-generation immigrants. There’s also reported correlation between eldest daughters and that constant sense of inadequacy — if this were a game of bingo I’d have a full house right now. I think the worst part of all of it all is that imposter syndrome never lets you see yourself how others see you. No amount of ego-inflating compliments or affirmations seem to be able to actually thaw the permafrost-like belief that you aren’t good enough. It’s a catch-22 of sorts — the praise momentarily stifles that skeptical inner voice but it finds a way to speak louder somehow.

I work in a career which is dominated by a lot of Type A personalities, self-assured individuals who are very rarely deterred from their own confidence in their capabilities. These people love to make it known that they’re qualified with a capital Q — some of these guys are the top minds in the field and are fully aware of it, and to an extent that’s how it should be — I think it’s totally valid to feel proud of everything you’ve achieved (while making sure not to portray that as arrogance). So why does the same mentality not seem to apply to me? Yes, I’ve just freshly started and a lot of these guys have been in the game longer than I’ve been alive but that shouldn’t discredit the fact that I had to put blood sweat and lots and lots of tears into getting to where I am today. You’d think by constantly being surrounded by these individuals some of their mindset would rub off on me, but it actually had the opposite effect — for lack of a better phrase I absorbed all their nonchalance and became extra chalant (?) And while it’s true that being overly confident isn’t always a good thing, I’d love to experience having even a little bit of that — just a small amount is fine, just to see what it’s like to finally feel worthy of what that piece of paper symbolising years of hard graft says.

I don’t really know what the purpose of this post was, perhaps I just needed to get this out in the hopes that someone else would also resonate? Or maybe someone with more wisdom than myself will see this and provide the key to defeating that negative inner narrative once and for all. After all, there has to be a solution to the constant noise, a way to trick yourself into believing that you’re capable, because to everyone else you literally are. Ultimately, it’s a journey I guess still has a few more dips and turns to it yet, but here’s hoping that this all becomes just another anecdote that the version of myself ten years from now can chuckle over while flicking through old journal entries.