7 thoughts on impostor syndrome

Sometimes you just publish the messy thing you're sick of looking at.

Tried to get AI to give me “three raccoons in a trench coat” and then “three raccoons in one trench coat” and then “three raccoons standing one on top of another in one trench coat.” This is the best we got. (SOURCE: imagine.art)

Today, an essay that didn’t quite come together. And so here it is in a retooled, messy format. Shhhhhh it’s fine.

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1) Introduction

I think a lot lately about this interview my former NPR colleague Audie Cornish did with Elle a few years ago. This was her answer to a question about impostor syndrome:

I used to feel impostor syndrome so strongly. Then I turned 40 and thought, This isn't cute anymore. How long can I pretend not to know what I'm doing? I actually really know what I'm doing.

I think about it especially because in recent years – aka, the period in which I turned 40 – my impostor syndrome just…kind of fell away. I’d therefore liken impostor syndrome to a cocoon, but that would imply that I consider myself a big, beautiful butterfly, which… [dismissive wank gesture]. 

So let’s say it’s like a cicada casing. It was a protective exoskeleton. It’s gone now. And now I shall go FLY AROUND SCREAMING.

Or, to use a more common analogy, I stopped being three raccoons in a trench coat and instead became…well, something else. A more functional adult, maybe. (WHO SCREAMS A LOT.)

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2) Maybe we all stopped thinking about it?

I used to think about impostor syndrome a lot. 

We all had it, I thought, and so if we all had it, did it really exist? Or was it the human condition?

Except everyone knows that person with the unearned sense of confidence – that guy who wanders around telling you why he’s right about everything. That guy doesn’t have impostor syndrome. 

Except he invariably CLAIMS to have it, which, ugh, dude, no you DON’T. 

Or does he?

Anyway.

In the last few years, the very idea of impostor syndrome sort of slipped out of my brain. And not only did I stop feeling it so much, I noticed, but my friends and people around me seemed to stop talking about it. I stopped seeing articles about it online. 

I started having all sorts of hypotheses: for example, impostor syndrome is often said to be more common and intense among marginalized people – women, POC, etc. So maybe as we all came to grips with systemic forces in the last decade or so – for example, as we women started actually talking to each other about the creeps who had been keeping us from doing good work for literally our entire working lives – we at least started wondering…

…wait a minute, are we in fact kind of good at what we do?

I’m not the only one who had this thought. In 2021, Ruchika Tulshyan and Jodi-Ann Burey wrote “Stop Telling Women They Have Imposter Syndrome” at Harvard Business Review – basically laying out that many women feel they’re faking it because they’re in environments where they genuinely *are* outsiders. If you’re in a boys’ club and you’re not a boy but you’re trying to act like you fit in there anyway, of course you feel like a faker.

Or another hypothesis: As the world burns, literally and figuratively, it’s possible that we all decided we had bigger fish to fry than twisting our fingers together and fearing we weren’t good enough.

Or I’m just projecting. Maybe “we all” didn’t do anything new. Maybe impostor syndrome didn’t quietly exit the zeitgeist.

I tried some simple ways of testing my hypothesis. Google n-grams (a measure of words/phrases’ use in books) only goes to 2019, and it shows that impostor syndrome was still on an asymptotic rocket ride as of then.

Hm. 

Google Trends (search data) also doesn’t really tell us that interest has fallen off. It does show a wild spike in October 2020, and then a flattening after that.

I haven’t been able to figure out what the spike was in fall 2020 (by all means tell me your theories)…but either way, it appears this thing is still in the zeitgeist.

So maybe I was projecting. Which, fine.

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3) You know, you don’t have to tell anyone about it.

Years ago, a coworker – let’s call her Cereal Bowl, because that’s what’s in front of me right now – walked past my desk as I was filling out my annual performance review. 

“Ugh. I fucking hate those things,” she said, glancing at my screen.

“Me too,” I said, tapping out a paragraph enumerating all the ways I could improve at my job.

“I try to take as little time as possible,” she said.

I shrugged sheepishly. “Yeah, I suppose I’m going into more detail than I need to.”

Cereal Bowl glanced at my screen again, seeing my earnest short essays about my abilities.

“You know, this old coworker told me this thing,” she said. “You don’t have to say anything bad about yourself. You don’t need to list any ‘areas for improvement.’ If the bosses think you aren’t doing a good job, they can tell you. But you don’t need to tell them first.”

“Oh,” I said. “That’s…kind of genius. Thank you.”

“No problem!” she said, and she went about her day while I sat there and stared into the middle-distance, letting my brain slowly leak out of my ear for the next 45 minutes. 

First off: I do believe this is the first documented instance of performance reviews achieving literally anything.

And secondly: what a concept.

Expand this kind of thinking outwards beyond your bosses, and life gets way easier. You don’t have to tell anyone how little you think you know. You can just assume people will complain if they don’t like what you’re doing (and believe me, they will).

Which means you don’t have to tell anyone you think you’re faking it.

I’m not saying it’s bad to share these feelings. If it makes you feel better, go do your thing.

But once you stop telling people, you just might discover that…oh. Things are fine. You are not, in fact, teetering on the shoulders of a fellow raccoon. 

One sub-hypothesis I have here is that in the post-Lean-In era, it became so common for people – especially high-achieving women – to talk about impostor syndrome that it almost felt like a requirement. It became a way to connect – to share a vulnerability, to show that you aren’t really as scary and intimidating as your skills and position would suggest; that you’re just like everyone else.

I’m not fully sure what Ms. Cornish meant when she said that she decided impostor syndrome wasn’t “cute anymore,” but for me, this is what it meant: that however vulnerable, disarming, comforting it might be to tell others I was an absolute mess who was just getting through her career by dint of luck and hard work…

…that wasn’t really doing me any good.

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4) The ONE downside of being congenitally Midwestern

And all this can be intensified by your culture. I am here thinking of my piles of elementary school report cards on which teachers approvingly wrote something to the effect of, “Danielle is great because she’s smart but doesn’t show it off to the other kids!” [ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: If you are once again making the dismissive wank gesture, go right ahead. I know I sound insufferable.]

And look. Does anyone want to be (or have) that kid who’s kind of an asshole about their strengths? No.

But I submit to you that constant, early messages that keeping quiet is best, because otherwise you’ll intimidate people, make them feel bad, scare them off, bum them out…those messages can eventually make impostor syndrome feel like a virtue. After all, it means you’re just like everyone! That’s good, right?

I would add, by the way, that those messages most certainly have a gendered aspect to them – I’d bet girls get told to hide their light under a bushel much more often than boys. 

But also, these messages are deeply Midwestern, and more than that, they’re rural. A primary feature of living in a place with very few people is a fierce, even pernicious sense of community. Everyone just kind of needs to stick together, even when they dislike each other. And that breeds conformity, for better *and* worse.

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5) A non-tiresome digression about class and privilege

For one year in my early 20s, I had a reprieve from feeling like a faker.

It was also, not coincidentally, one of the worst years of my life. This was when I was a debt collector just after college.

(Danielle, how did you become a debt collector? you ask. I sigh and place my head on my desk and explain: The job title was ‘legal assistant,’ and I was applying to law schools at the time, so it seemed like a fine job for a while, and it was literally the only job I got after months of shooting resumes out of a t-shirt gun at employers, and my dad had informed me that ‘the gravy train stops after college,’ and also my bartending job at one of 3 bars in a town of 1,000 was never going to get me out of my 1989 Oldsmobile, let alone into an apartment, considering that I earned $2 an hour, plus tips, but the tips were mostly free-drink tickets from the pulltab machine.)

This job was hell, in part because it was deceased debt collection. That is to say: when your aunt Enid died with a $4,000 balance on her Citibank Visa, I was the one who called your family to ask, “How are you planning on resolving this debt?” [BY THE WAY: If I can impress any one lesson upon you, let it be this: you are NOT RESPONSIBLE for your relatives’ credit card debts. Their estates are responsible, but you are not. You don’t owe deceased debt collectors shit. Okay.]

Let me reiterate: this job was hell. I have almost never felt worse about myself.

I’ll tell you one thing, though: I did not feel like a faker. I felt like I deserved better work…but I in no way felt like a faker.

Which is to say: to some degree, feeling like an impostor is a luxury. Work a shit job, and you’ll never look at impostor syndrome the same way again. Feel like you’re faking it? It means you have goals. It means you want to get somewhere. Olé! Hoorah! Etc.

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6) Shit’s always going to be hard.

A few years ago, we had a toast at NPR for a coworker who had hit a milestone – think 30, 40, 50 years at NPR. This titan of journalism stood before all of us, raised their glass, and said, “You know, you do this for decades, and you never stop being terrified of falling on your face.”

Panicked, I turned to a coworker friend who is himself maybe a decade older than me. “Wait…is that true? That never goes away?” I asked.

“Never!” he said with a smile and a shrug. “Never does!”

Great! I thought. Great! Coooooool cool cool cool cool cool.

This, at the time, confirmed to me that imposter syndrome never goes away. 

It was years later that I realized that impostoring wasn’t what the Titan or my friend were talking about. They weren’t talking about the fear of being found out. 

They were talking about fuckups. Fuckups happen to anyone. 

The difficult thing for me was accepting the nuance here – some dim part of me thought that becoming sure of myself would mean never making a mistake again. That I would float easily through the rest of my career, cranking out gem after gem.

Which, no.

Lately, a piece that I’ve been working on for literally weeks nearly brought me to a screaming fit at the office. Not because I think I don’t know what I’m doing and that I’ll be found out. More because the damn thing isn’t perfect and I’m sick of looking at it.

I submit that figuring this out — that you can always make mistakes, that you’ll never be fully comfortable, that things will never be perfect — might just be part of learning how to live without imploding.

We’re all grappling with this flavor of nuance all the time – the musician you love, it turns out, is kind of a horrible person in their personal life. The politician you are considering voting for doesn’t align with you on 150% of your beliefs. The work you do is passable but not incredible.

Shit is hard. Nothing is black and white. But it’s fine.

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7) Conclusion

The realization that I was, in fact, not 3 raccoons in a trench coat hit me on a recent reporting trip. I was barreling down a road in central Michigan in a rental car, ticking through my mental checklist of reporting things to do, and I realized I hadn’t really felt like I was faking it in…a couple years, probably.

It’s not a coincidence that this happened on a reporting trip. I love reporting trips. It’s nearly pure independence – go to a place, drive around, get what you need, check in occasionally, come back. 

I definitely know what I’m doing. I enjoy my solitude. I enjoy the little nest I make in my rental car. As the trip goes on, I amass a pile of fast food detritus. And every morning when I leave my sensible mid-priced hotel, I open my sensible midsized sedan and burrow into the pile of Starbucks spinach-feta-wrap sleeves and McDonald’s McGriddles wrappers, and I plug in my USB cable and turn on a podcast and thank God that she in her infinite wisdom gave me a job where I get blast down an open road for hours on end, talking to no one except the McElroy brothers.

But I get things done.

I am not three raccoons in a trench coat, I realized; I am one raccoon in a Nissan Altima.

And this – [cue strings] – this is what I hope for you, young people. This lesson, young women especially – [cue timpani and horns] – I want you to absorb into your bones. You may not know everything. You may make mistakes. But that doesn’t mean you don’t know what you’re doing. 

And even if you somehow truly don’t know what you’re doing right now – even if you are blindly stumbling through your workdays [cue Mormon Tabernacle Choir] – I hope you can take heart that eventually you, too, will get to a place in your career where you can build a garbage pile in a rental car and find solitude in it and screech at anyone who gets close. 

I hope that you, too, can be one proud, solitary, filthy raccoon.

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GARDEN UPDATE

It turns out that I am too good at gardening. Or I just planted my zucchinis and tomatoes too close together. They are nearly bursting my chicken-wire enclosure at the seams.

Anyway, first harvest happened this week. Used the tops of thinned-out, infant carrots to make a pesto for pizza. And cut myself a big-ass tub of spinach and a beautiful lil’ zucchini.

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THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS

Katharine Hepburn’s brownies: I love to bake. Especially big afternoon-long complicated projects. And so I had been ignoring this NYT brownies recipe for years, turning my nose up at its simplicity, its lack of melted chocolate or layers or any form of difficulty. And then I had dinner guests this week, ON A WEEKNIGHT. Good Lord, who am I, Emeril? Anyway. Turns out, these brownies are flipping dyno-miiiiiite and deserve every bit of their five-star rating.

The gender gap in young voters: I did an episode of NPR’s Consider This exploring the widening partisan gender gap among the youngsters. Please listen! I will be doing more on the gender politics!

A QUICK ASIDE: “Danielle, your old posts are all paywalled,” you say. Yes they are. There was some recent unpleasantness at NPR that led to a bunch of mean trolls bugging me on Twitter and just freaking me out in general. So I paywalled most of the old stuff in an attempt to leave as few places as possible for people to comment obscene things. Will I ever un-paywall it? Yes, probably. And if there’s an old post you really want, just email me and I’ll send it it’s fine.

YOUR LATEST OLD-INTERNET JOY: I’m going to do a run of Awl/Hairpin articles for my old-internet joy in my next few newsletters, because I fucking miss the Awl and the Hairpin. Is there an equivalent of these sites now? And don’t say McSweeney’s. It’s not fucking McSweeney’s. Get right out of here with that shit. Anyway. Here is a recipe for “pink panty pulldown punch” by the always-wonderful Jolie Kerr. (NOTE: This recipe is of no use to you unless you are a mid-20s low-paid low-level worker living in a group house and wanting to throw a party that everyone will forget, but also that no one will forget.)