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November 12, 2007
Impostor syndrome
Holy fuck. Who is this woman, and what has she been doing looking around inside my skull all this time?
Case in point: On a recent evening, Columbia University held a well-attended workshop for young academics who feel like frauds.These were duly vetted, highly successful scholars who nonetheless live in creeping fear of being found out. Exposed. Sent packing.
If that sounds familiar, you may have the impostor syndrome. In psychological terms, that's a cognitive distortion that prevents a person from internalizing any sense of accomplishment.
"It's like we have this trick scale," says Valerie Young, a traveling expert on the syndrome who gave the workshop at Columbia. Here's how that scale works: Self-doubt and negative feedback weigh heavily on the mind, but praise barely registers. You attribute your failures to a stable, inner core of ineptness. Meanwhile, you discount your successes as accidental or, worse, as just so many confidence jobs. Every positive is a false positive.
[Via Ms. HX, of course, who is so much less of a fraud than me it isn't even funny.]
Posted by ray at November 12, 2007 2:43 PM | Permalink
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Comments
Via Ms. HX, of course, who is so much less of a fraud than me it isn't even funny.
I'm honored to be considered less fraudulent than a complete and total non-fraud.
Posted by: Hiromi at November 12, 2007 3:55 PM
Ray
According to Ms. Matthews, a person with impostor syndrome typically experiences a cycle of distress when faced with a new task: self-doubt, followed by perfectionism, then — sometimes but not always — procrastination.
I wonder about my procrastination. I don't feel like an impostor, but there is something similar taking place. I'm afraid of sounding off the mark, perhaps making statements that I'll regret, or displaying an ignorance about New Orleans when I write. It's easy to write bleats about anxiety, truly personal things, but it is difficult to write observations or even opinions.
It is similar. I don't want to sound like an ass hat pundit. Ass hat syndrome? But, people do respect me for having an opinion.
They are just so costly to formulate, opinions, when you care about being reasonable. Anyone can have an opinion, but do they have something with sharing?
Which is why it's not an insecurity per se, because I don't fancy myself a social commentator. That is an offshoot of gathering and publishing information (which I'm not doing much anymore).
I'm not an academic. I'm attempting to live off of publishing.
The one thing that I've thought, that if I could embrace it, would be a laziness. To say, that's too hard, all I really have to do is X. There are times when I want to pull a lot of people together, but end up over committed. What is the easiest thing I could do to nudge toward the desired result? But, that mantra is uncomfortable because it feels manipulative.
Posted by: Alan Gutierrez at November 13, 2007 10:14 AM
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