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Imposter Syndrome

Kelly made our first fake ID.  $25 and it’d take the weekend.  We didn’t ask many questions.  Paid and waited.  When she slid it over to us on the Monday, we saw that what she was up to was closer to arts ‘n’ crafts than espionage.  She hadn’t used scanners or software or anything remotely digital, but rather just scalpelled off the last digit of our birth year, replaced it with a smudgy ink transfer of a different number, and re-laminated the whole card.  It was a school ID, so - she said - some places wouldn’t accept it no matter the year, but her work was sufficient for most bars and liquor stores.  They’d barely glance at it and give it the OK.  

“It’ll work more often than it doesn’t,” she said.  

“And if it never works?,” we asked. 

“Then that’s on you for looking too young,” she said and cackled. 

This is how we turned 18 at 15, how we became a fake adult.

It did work more often than not, but that didn’t mean we were ever sure or confident it’d work.  The anxiety that came whenever anyone asked to see our ID was regular and unavoidable.  The mere anticipation that someone might ask to see our ID was enough to elevate our heart rate.  When they’d inevitably ask, we’d express rehearsed, glad surprise - “Oh! Sure! Hang on!  Here you go!” - then try to embody the added, fraudulent years by assuming nonchalance, looking all around at anything other than the fake ID now held in that authority’s hands.  Sometimes we’d be asked to recite our birthdate, testify to the facts of the card, but usually folks held it for less than half a second before waving us in somewhere or asking us how we wanted to pay.

While we were always nervous that we’d be found out, that our face or comportment would betray the (in)expertly forged document, that nervousness never stuck around long.  As soon as the real adult confirmed that we, too, were (according to an official-looking and legitimate document)  also an adult, we slipped right back into being not-at-all-an-adult.  We were a fake, a fraud, an imposter for all of a minute.  The con was so short we barely even registered that it was a con.  

We figured, truly, that most of the time the authorities - such as they were - were playing along with us.  We were both just performing roles in a little social game.  They needed to appear to care about our age and we needed to have the appearance of proof to be that age as well as a demeanor that allowed them, for a sec, to willfully suspend disbelief.  Both of us were, in a way, faking it.  

We live in an age of deceit - faux heiresses, crypto scams, ponzi schemes, silicon valley frauds, deep fakes - but, in our experience, most people’s little lies or untruths never quite rise to the level of significant moral wrong.  Folks carry fake IDs, fib about exes, embellish a little on their CV, fudge some facts to a friend or family member, or just decide not to disclose certain truths.  We live, the majority of us, closer to truth than falsity, reality than fantasy.  But, despite the fact that we’re each seldom guilty of faking much, this doesn’t seem to stop a great many people in great many situations from feeling like an imposter.

The “imposter phenomenon” (now more commonly called “imposter syndrome”) was identified and named in the late 1970s.  The term describes the state of feeling that one’s success or status is, in some sense, unmerited and that said lack of merit is going to be, sooner rather than later, discovered.  It’s a peculiar kind of anxiety (and one that, notably, tends to disproportionately affect certain populations more than others).  One feels on the brink of being uncovered as nothing but a phony, a faker, and losing all the success or status or esteem that you’d achieved.  It is like living in the moment when the liquor store clerk looks back and forth between your fake ID and your face save that, well, the ID here isn’t fake.  It just feels like it isn’t really real, isn’t truly accurate. 

Imposter syndrome is, it seems, rampant.  Getting a job, going to grad school, being promoted, winning an award, gaining too many followers, or really any slight change to your outward status is enough to prompt the uncomfortable feeling that you or your actions have been beneficially misrecognized.  You got the job not because you’re qualified, but just because you know people who know people.  You’re in a grad program because someone wasn’t paying close enough attention to your application.  You got the promotion because your boss is dumb.  The causal mechanics don’t really matter.  What matters is that you have been somehow rewarded or recognized for actions or skills you feel you don’t truly possess.  You may not be guilty for being made an imposter, but you will suffer the consequences of being found out.  

Sooner or later, somehow or another, the world is going to catch up to the reality you know very well.  You don’t merit this nice thing or, rather, you as you know yourself do not match up to the you that the world seems to be noticing.  The world is seeing you all wrong and you’re reaping ill-gotten rewards (even if said rewards just amount to cultural cache or social clout).  You’re living in a prolonged, differed disaster that - from the outside - looks like a kind of blessing.

Feeling like an imposter isn’t, of course, solely a psychological issue.  It isn’t all (or even mostly) in your head.  A significant part of the issue lies in our perceptions of others.  You feel like an imposter because - for some reason or another - you do not resemble (in your own estimation) what you believe is the real thing.  You’re an imposter artist because real artists do x, y, or z.  You’re an imposter senior business administrator because real senior business administrators know more than you do (they must!) or have better experience than you do (they can’t but!) or are somehow ineffably authentic or genuine or legit in a way that you are not and cannot be.  

Taking yourself to be an imposter is also be the result of the organizational structure in which you find yourself.  You feel like an imposter because you run into standards or expectations for which you weren’t prepared.  The structure seems to suppose that you are different or other than you are.  You get caught up in the (perhaps mistaken) presumptions of others.  A term or name will be bandied about and folks my presume you’re familiar.  As you know, Miller said… We’ll obviously have to focus on the T-8 throughput…  and while ignorance or a misalignment of your knowledge base with that of another’s is possible for all sorts of reasons, the person who feels themselves an imposter knows only one - their abilities or knowledge or merits do not correspond to normative expectations or an authority’s (supposed to be legitimate) presuppositions.

To get over or work on getting over imposter syndrome, folks recommend all sorts of things from performing positive affirmations (as though this were just a problem of low self-esteem) to recognizing that this feeling is natural, false, and widely shared (as if the issue were that we’d conned ourselves into feeling like a con).  The solutions, though, are often short lived.  The feeling that we aren’t what we’re recognized to be, aren’t identical to the image others have of us, crops up regardless of how often we intone that “we are deserving” or discount certain feelings as inaccurate or common.  The only solution, really, that we’ve found that works isn’t about undoing or annulling the syndrome - but extending it.

We might be an imposter - getting unearned gains, benefiting from the misperceptions of others - but who’s to say that everyone else isn’t also an imposter?  We might not be a real writer, but what’s a real writer?  We might not deserve the attention or clout, but who deserves any attention or clout?  See, the real problem with imposter syndrome, as we see it, is that it imbues the world (or some part of it) with unearned legitimacy.  To imagine oneself an imposter is to live under the assumption that other people or the structures in which they participate are operating according to some good faith, legitimate, and nigh transcendental rules when there really are none.  The so-called imposter imagines a world far more regulated, real, and discerning than any that actually exists.

It isn’t that everything is determined by arbitrary or meaningless chance, but rather that the complexity of everything is such that untangling the means by which you or your skills have been accurately or inaccurately analyzed, assessed, and acknowledged isn’t a possible thing.  There is no way, really, of knowing whether you’re getting what you deserve (by your own lights) or just profiting from some comedy of errors.  Given that you’re not about to understand why or how you got what you got, all you can really do is appreciate that no one really knows why or how they got what they got or how anything at all ever is being distributed down the line.  It’s all a crazy chaos of effort and accident, right places and right enough seeming actions.  Everything, really, is just a masquerade where no one takes off their masks for long or, when they do, they’re never quite sure if the face they see is the same as that seen by others or if, maybe, it’s just another and subtler mask. 

We’re all imposters - immanently deserving of nothing because who’s out there giving out just deserts?  And how are they deciding?  And who decide they were the real deciders anyways?  And who wants desert all the time anyways (just or otherwise)?

All this to say, we got our media credentials for Fantasia Film Festival earlier this afternoon.  We called ourselves “a writer” for “a publication” called Ooof! Bong! despite knowing that we aren’t a real writer and this isn’t a real publication.  We’d like to believe the people at the press desk knew this too and they just played along.  We all performed our roles in the little social game.  Now we can go back to being the nameless and unjudged thing we most of the time are until, later today standing in line for the first feature of the festival, we are asked - once again - to produce our ID, our little card that proves that we truly are exactly what we’re pretending to be.

We’re not entirely sure what we’re seeing tonight - but it looks like it’s going to be Mami Wata (feature) - which is said to be about “an ancient water deity [that] reigns over progress and power” - followed by The Perfect Place to Cry (short) - about a woman crying in her car while a man approaches (too real??) - and Blackout (feature) - which seems to center on “an artist struggling with his lycanthropy.”  Each seem like fun (?), intense (?), interesting (?), authentic (???) things.  We’ll have more to say about these movies and other movies as well as misc. other things (the smallest red carpet!) at Fantasia in the coming days.  Keep it real until then, you beautiful and perfect imposters.