If you asked me most of the time if I have imposter syndrome, I would tell you, “Not anymore.” Years of therapy and a lot of work on self awareness and self compassion make me pretty good at realistically assessing my skills and abilities. Often, I feel like I navigate a world where women are SUPPOSED to have imposter syndrome, and my clear eyed assessment of my strengths and knowledge is off-putting. It’s just a fact that I can almost never be taken at my word when I claim to know something. I have to be able to back it up, on the spot.
And yet, yesterday, I submitted some really complex, high stakes work for review. And spent the day second guessing myself. My brain finally told me that this second guessing… this is imposter syndrome. But that growing void right underneath my sternum? It’s sure that I got this disastrously wrong and that everyone is going to know how incompetent I am. Even as I write this, saying it out loud, that void gets bigger. Because, oh god, now a whole new audience of people are going to know how incompetent I am.
My behavior-cognitive-therapy techniques are no match for these feelings. My brain is doing its job – reminding myself that I literally teach classes and write papers on this subject. Looking for facts that point to my competence. And the void takes that evidence that I know what I am doing and builds a higher pedestal for me to fall from. Imagine, knowing someone helped write the instruction manual and then seeing that they are incapable of following it. What glorious schadenfreude. Everyone will talk about it.
I’ll get feedback on this soon enough on how I did on this work. But that’s not really the point. I could have missed something major. Everyone does sometimes. I could have done great. I could have done solidly average. What I want, really, isn’t a reminder that I’m good at this stuff. What I want is a deeper, emotional belief that my worth is not tied to my competence. And that continues to elude me.
Let’s be real, if I am incompetent at my job, it doesn’t change my humanity, but it sure as hell changes my ability to make a living. On some level, I know that I am good enough at what I do that I am not going to get fired for one bad analysis. I’ve made mistakes before. I’ve made bad calls. I’ve bombed presentations. Perfection is not the standard to remain gainfully employed. And yet. Here I am spilling words.
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