IMPOSTOR SYNDROME HELPS US GROW
We can all feel inadequate in at least one area of our lives, but if you want to elicit change, try embracing it, says Anna Wharton
As a child, growing up in Cambridgeshire, I felt like an impostor within my own family. Both my parents remarried and had children with new partners, but I could never shake the feeling that I was a cuckoo in their nests.
I only saw my father every three weeks and my stepfather was a binge drinker. When his behaviour became intolerable, my mother would flee to a friend’s house. Sometimes she took me with her, sometimes she didn’t, so I’d seek solace at the next door neighbour’s. At their place, I tried to blend into the furniture and watch TV with them, hoping they wouldn’t notice when I was still around after the credits rolled.
The one thing I craved – to be the favourite – was always just out of reach, and even though I’m now an adult, those feelings remain. It’s probably why I chose to write my debut novel, The Imposter, about the subject, using many of my own experiences as inspiration.
‘These issues run deep when they conflict with our core psychological need for things such as certainty, stability, safety, security and unconditional love,’ explains Dr Emma Mardlin, consultant psychotherapist and author of Out Of Your Comfort Zone: Breaking Boundaries For A Life Beyond Limits (Findhorn Press). ‘Those needs are generic to us all and if they’re not met or they malfunction in some way during childhood, the feelings of inadequacy that result creep into adulthood and it’s challenging to let go of them. No one is immune from having impostor syndrome.’
I met my first husband when I was just 17. Chris came from a nice family on the other side of the lake to our council estate. His family were not divorced or blended with others; he had grandparents and they ate together at the dinner table and had dessert with cream from a pouring jug. That felt to me how a family should look. Yet, during our six years together, the feeling that I didn’t belong remained. I simply couldn’t reinvent myself to be someone who fitted into such a traditional set-up. We divorced when I was 24.
On my 40th birthday, I married again, this time it was to the frontman of a Britpop band who is the father of my daughter, now eight. His world was also different to mine and I never felt comfortable in my own skin at his gigs. I’d never lauded a celebrity, so couldn’t understand the fans who followed him around, idolising someone they didn’t really know. It seemed so shallow to me, and while other women might revel in their role as rock-star wife, I internalised it, blaming myself for not fitting in.
Was it right to feel impostor syndrome in those situations? Probably not, but the discomfort I felt in both of them was enough to put me in touch with an intuition that told me it was right to move on.
Many of us feel the impostor within our workplace, too, and I was no different. I started my career as a journalist when I was 18 and my ambition meant that I grew out of my roles. I took chances and quit jobs without having another lined up. I remember a magazine editor saying once: ‘Maybe you’re just a really dissatisfied person.’ ‘Maybe,’ I replied.
In my 30s, I moved from magazines to newspapers, and most of the people I worked with were Oxbridge and private-school educated. For the first three months, I put on a posh accent in the hope of blending in. Only at the end of a long day when I stepped into the lift and the electronic voice announced: ‘Going daan,’ did I feel like at least someone in the building sounded like me.
Then, at 42, with little formal education behind me, I applied to study creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Of course, those same feelings of inadequacy bubbled up to the surface again. ‘I’m not clever enough to do a Masters,’ I thought, despite the fact that while
I was studying, I had a memoir I’d ghostwritten sitting in the Sunday Times bestseller charts. In fact, my editor at Bloomsbury assumed I was teaching on the course rather than studying it. I was the last person in my cohort who should have felt like an impostor, but oddly, I couldn’t dismiss the feeling that I didn’t belong there.
Yet I’ve realised it is normal to feel doubts, to question whether we
‘THE FEELING THAT I DIDN’T BELONG REMAINED’
belong in a situation, because once we face that uncomfortable feeling, we can decide whether or not to move on, as I did in those relationships, or hang in there and grow to feel more confident, as I did in my career.
‘It’s often the case that many of us feel impostors both personally and professionally,’ explains Dr Mardlin. ‘We internalise this and torment ourselves with it, despite external evidence to the contrary, because of an underlying root cause. Consistent with impostor syndrome is the notion that we can simultaneously hold two perceptions and ideas of ourselves: this internal reality – the story we tell ourselves governed by our deep roots – and our external front; what we want the rest of the world to perceive, or what we may feel we need or wish to project.’
Luckily, all these feelings of inadequacy, at various times and in different facets of my life, have never once made me feel that I should stop putting myself into positions where I feel like I don’t belong. Ultimately, if we are ever going to grow, we have to feel utterly out of our depth at some stage. Without impostor syndrome we wouldn’t examine our feelings, our areas of discomfort, our strengths and weaknesses. We resist that state of mind; we think it means there is something wrong with us, but ultimately, it serves us to decide whether we are forging ahead in the right direction.
The only area of my life in which I have finally reconciled myself to these feelings is that of motherhood – and even that took some time. As a divorced single mother, it is hard to sit alongside those seemingly happy families and not feel that the family life you have created for your child is lacking in some way: our houses are quieter, the atmosphere not as busy. As a single parent, you fill this void with other families; the very people that you feel you don’t measure up against, the ones who, according to you, are doing things ‘the right way’. So I have to constantly remind myself that the
‘right way’ is ‘my way’.
As Dr Mardlin says: ‘Despite the challenges impostor syndrome can induce, it equally provides us with an opportunity for immense personal growth in our lives. Everything is for a reason – be that good, bad, challenging or indifferent – and when we have an awareness and acceptance of this; we can reach our greatest heights. Impostor syndrome provides enormous scope in terms of reflection, self-introspection and positive learning, if we can only take these things on board.’
This is exactly the reason why I continued to put myself into situations that made me feel inferior
– I wanted to change. I remember once mentioning to my stepmum that I wanted to become a full-time writer of books rather than journalism. She replied: ‘Well, I’m sure you will, you’ve done everything else you said you were going to.’ That was a lightbulb moment for me. I suddenly looked back on my life and realised that those insecurities only existed in my head, not in my actions.
The closest thing I have to describe how this feels is this explanation of how lobsters grow, a video of which I watched on Youtube: lobsters live inside a rigid outer shell and as their bodies grow, they start to feel uncomfortable, casting off their shell each time to form a new one. Basically, the lobster reinvents himself over and over again, and the stimulus for him to do this is feeling uncomfortable inside his own ‘skin’.
I think that’s exactly what impostor syndrome does. It causes us stress and discomfort, but that is our opportunity for growth. So we need to continue to seek out these challenges and stretch ourselves in environments, with people, or in scenarios that challenge us. It’s the only way not to feel ‘stuck’, like I once was, and move ever closer to the life we both desire and deserve.