I Think I'm Over Imposter Syndrome

I mean not personally - I intend to hate myself until the day I die - but I'm ready to stop talking about imposter syndrome on a professional level. 

I'm a grad student (hence the endless melancholy) and I hear about imposter syndrome a lot from my department, my peers, and even my supervisor. Imposter syndrome is the lurking feeling that you aren't actually as smart and capable as you've been led to believe and soon someone will come and expose you as a fraud. Graduate students, especially minoritized and first-generation students, feel this all the time since we're often the first of our kind in a given space and there is immense pressure to not fuck it up lest we prove that people like us really are less capable. People with impostor syndrome feel that their success is not earned, their capabilities overstated, and their spectacular failure inevitable. It can be a paralyzing issue where people become so afraid of being "found out" that they cannot make another move. 

Imposter syndrome comes up everywhere from memes to serious orientation seminars and it's increasingly hard for me to see the term meaning anything. In fact, one of the grad student meme accounts I follow just posted about meta-imposter syndrome where you feel like an imposter because all the capable people around you keep feeling like imposters so clearly you and your inadequacy must be the real imposter. 

Over the past few years this idea has been expanding to the point where every negative feeling felt in graduate school is a matter of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome is so prevalent that I'm often left to wonder if I have anywhere else to store my bad feelings. What if I'm actually just a fuck up sometimes and I should feel bad? What exactly does a student without imposter syndrome look like? Are they well-fed, well-rested, and comfortably shitting out papers? Or are they supposed to take on a kind of Moby Dick aesthetic where they are driven to their own destruction by their singular area of research? If I'm not supposed to feel like an imposter then what should I feel like? 

In many ways, I get it. It's reassuring to know that other smart people feel doubt and insecurity. There is a lot of comfort in knowing that other people have ridiculous spirals where they think that a rough class or a rejected paper will somehow lead to destitution. It's also nice when a university can acknowledge that graduate students have feelings and that we aren't just expendable little labour bots. 

But if everyone has imposter syndrome then it clearly isn't a matter of personal deficiency or disorder - it's systemic. And we already knew that it was systemic because the term was coined to describe the ways that gender and racial minorities often feel like they'll be found out as the "affirmative action hire" or perhaps the "token" woman or trans person. First-generation grad students are also made to feel inadequate and out of place because they aren't as familiar with all the clandestine etiquette of academia. But I struggle to see this as a solely internal struggle. For a lot of students, there is in fact someone who wants to "expose" them because their racism, sexism, or classism has led them to believe that some people really are just token entries to fill diversity quotas. Graduate school is an increasingly competitive space where limited spots lead to even more limited jobs. The fear and anxiety aren't just maladjusted reactions to this reality. It's not always all in my head. 

And this is all intentional. An exclusionary system is making people feel excluded and it is, therefore, right to feel excluded and out of place - this is not an anxious overreaction. "Gaslighting" is an incredibly overused term and while I think it means "the process by which someone convinces you that you've lost your grip on reality" I'm not quite sure anymore. But what I am sure of is that it's incredibly convenient for an institution like a university to look out on disabled and BIPOC students and say "Of course we want you here, you feel out of place because of imposter syndrome. You put those ideas in your own head, We haven't been trying to push you out - you made that up all on your own."

By talking about imposter syndrome over and over we are not actually helping anyone - we're telling them to get their feelings in order. A syndrome is a personal trouble and not a public issue so it is left up to individual solutions. We feel bad because we're meant to feel bad. If we felt good we might start asking for pesky things like unions and enough money to eat. 

Of course, some of it is a lot pettier than that. If anything, all this talk of impostor syndrome is just a slightly classier way to have a pissing contest. If everyone is talking on and on about how they have all these accomplishments and work 26 hours a day and still feel like they aren't enough then they're really just humble bragging - they're taking on an air of self-deprecation in order to enumerate all the brilliant things they've done without looking like an ass. Similarly, if your department sits you down on the first day of classes and tells you that imposter syndrome and overwork are common problems then what they're really saying is that everyone is working harder than you. If people feel empty and insecure about their big publications and major grants then you should feel like actual shit for what little you've managed to achieve. 

The university wants us to be happy enough to not kill ourselves (that's bad press after all) but they still want productivity to increase. We are made to feel that we should be research machines and when we can't live up to this impossible ideal we are the problem. We need time management strategies and workshops and counselling and Xanax. The onus is always on the shaken student and never the shaking institution.