Imposter syndrome is a very real thing. Feeling like you don’t deserve what you have, don’t belong where you are. Confusion over how it happened, and some days, exhaustion at maintaining it.
Impostor syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon or fraud syndrome) is a term coined in 1978 by clinical psychologists Dr. Pauline R. Clance and Suzanne A. Imes referring to high-achieving individuals marked by an inability to internalize their accomplishments and a persistent fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.[1] Despite external evidence of their competence, those exhibiting the syndrome remain convinced that they are frauds and do not deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck, timing, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. Some studies suggest that impostor syndrome is particularly common among high-achieving women.[2]
I get that, the whole sentence. I totally understand it. What it doesn’t do is dive into the fatigue that permeates your soul as you try to keep up. It doesn’t say describe how some days you are terrified of facing what is in your inbox, how your heart lurches at every email, thinking “this is it”. How every loss is greater than the long list of success, carrying a massive strike to your confidence.
I describe myself and my success as “master manipulator” How I am able to sell anything, even your confidence in me, and as I say it, a tiny part of me knows it isn’t true, but I can’t help but believe that most of my success comes from my ability to trick and convince you that I am right.
I look at my home, my life, my family, my career, and it is all foreign to me. I don’t understand how it happened, how it “worked” out. I see the numbers grow in my bank account, and all I can expect is that soon, it will all be gone. That what I have built has been built on pipe dreams, on posturing, on nothing.
I don’t feel like I earned it most days. I don’t feel like I deserved it. I don’t feel smarter than the other person.
Some days I wake up and think it would be easier to just not try. To not work, or build, or plan. It would be easier to let my husband take the lead, so I could sit back as “mother” and take care of the things I know how to do.
To be where I feel I should belong.
Impostor syndrome, yes. It is real. And it can be the thing that stops us from moving forward, or it can be the very thing that forces us to.
I feel all the words up there in the description, and I can either ignore them, and continue to tell myself I don’t deserve this, or I can wake up, and own my success, and my smarts, and be the person that I am, beyond all doubt.
I can continue answering the questions, providing solutions that lurch into my brain unbidden. I can continue to try. To grow. To build.
I can force my own soul to BELIEVE that I earned my place here, and that what I create is valuable and beneficial. I can spend time looking at the numbers, comparing stats and have PROOF that I am contributing something that is good.
Maybe I can be all these things, plus a mother, and a wife, and a sister and a woman. Maybe all these things make me even better at those things?
Perhaps I can claim my success?
Maybe.