Sarah Gibbard Cook
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Getting It Wrong

1/15/2018

8 Comments

 
​What joy to wake at home, after dreaming we moved out because we had no business living in a place this nice. The dream followed an exchange about the humiliation of trying to look like the cool girls in high school and getting it wrong.
Other memories flood back. Wondering, in my twenties, when I would start to feel like a grown-up instead of pretending. Shocked, in my thirties, to be approached by an acquaintance told by her therapist to interview successful women. Recently reluctant to join a group of writers, unsure I’d belong in spite of writing for a living for over twenty years.

“Impostor syndrome" was coined in the 1970s for high-achieving women’s fear of being unmasked as a fraud. Studies also find it common among men, with a difference. Women are socialized to be modest and faulted for overconfidence. Men, socialized not to look vulnerable, are under pressure to hide self-doubt. If you feel like an impostor, you’re in good company:

Albert Einstein, late in life: “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”

Maya Angelou: “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find me out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.”

Neil Gaiman, on a gathering of notables: “I felt that at any moment they would realize that I didn’t qualify to be there, among those people who had really done things.” Another attendee, the first man on the moon, questioned his own invitation; he’d done nothing special, just gone where he was sent. Gaiman goes on: “If Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for.”
8 Comments
Matt
1/15/2018 09:26:28 am

Interesting, I had just recently heard about Imposter Syndrome myself. In the end it looks to me like it is mainly a mismatch between the situation you find yourself in and what you might abstractly think you "deserve". There's no particular reason these two things would match anyway. And of course the other direction (thinking you deserve more than you're getting) is so common it's unlikely to raise any eyebrows.

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Sarah link
1/15/2018 09:57:35 am

Yes, a mismatch between where one is and where one finds oneself - and also a mismatch between how one feels and how others perceive one. I've heard it called comparing your inside to other people's outsides.

I take comfort from Neil Gaiman's idea that success is a matter of both hard work and luck. It's not a random lottery, but of those who bring talent and hard work, there's luck involved in which become famous or highly "successful" by the measure of their field. And some of them may feel they've gotten in over their heads.

Love your reflection that there's no reason anyway to expect a match between where you are and what you think you deserve.

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Lisa
1/15/2018 09:45:28 am

I think it might have a bit to do with the fact that we hang around with other people who do what we do, our peers, and we don't think we are any better than THEY are, or unusual, because they do what we do. But we are pretty different from OTHER people who are amazed at what we do. That doesn't totally explain the fear of being found out, though.

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Sarah link
1/15/2018 10:17:48 am

Good point about seeing ourselves in relation to peers who do much the same. And even though a few unknown writers (for example) get a major book deal and more don't, we see each other as colleagues and cheer each other on.

Researchers say the imposter syndrome is especially common among people who grew up in alcoholic or perfectionist homes, people new to a job or position, and creatives whose work (if it's noticed at all) is subject to reviews, often critical. Part of the fear of being found out is internalizing every criticism or taking every imperfection as failure. Oh my God, I left out a mandatory comma, they'll discover I can't edit worth a darn.

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Beth Genne Gibbard
1/15/2018 10:08:38 am

Dame Ninette de Valois, matriarch of British ballet, founder of the Royal Ballet of Great Britain and the Royal Ballet School, often called the "mother of English ballet" who I interviewed when she was in her nineties, also told me that she kept "waiting to be found out". Beth

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Sarah link
1/15/2018 10:25:28 am

Beth, what a wonderful example! Are dancers, like artists and musicians and writers, exposed to reviews as soon as they start to attract notice? Even if all the reviews are favorable, there's always the possibility of a hostile one, and for many that's enough to stir perennial self-doubt.

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Rhonda Peterson
1/15/2018 11:08:40 pm

On the subject of the dream you woke from, I've often had a dream that's related. I dream that I'm in a classroom (could be jr. high, high school or college), and a test is handed out. I suddenly realize that I haven't studied for it -- or in some cases, even come to any classes! (Totally unlike me in real life, as you might guess.) In the dream, I think, I knew I was going to have to take this test, why didn't I prepare for it? When I wake up, I stop and consider what it is I'm facing in life that I feel so unprepared for!

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Sarah link
1/16/2018 09:00:53 am

That's one of my stock dreams too! Along with not being able to find the classroom, and realizing my flight leaves in 20 minutes and I haven't yet started to pack. Last night's version was being late for a meeting I was supposed to chair and unable to find the meeting room. I wonder if we dream about the things that are most unlike us because those are areas we'd be particularly distraught to screw up.

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    I'm a historian who writes novels and literary nonfiction. My home base is Madison, Wisconsin. 

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