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You Are Not Your Impostor Syndrome

Give yourself some credit

Zachary Flower
2 min readJun 22, 2024

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You’ve come a long way since your first job, and still have a long way to go until your last.

As someone who has personally struggled with that subtle, yet all encompassing fear of “being found out” as actually terrible at my job, I can promise that impostor syndrome means three things:

You care.

While I’ve heard it said that “only narcissists don’t get impostor syndrome,” I don’t think that’s entirely true. Another group of people who don’t get seem to get impostor syndrome are the ones that are wholly indifferent to the job at hand.

You may feel like an impostor, but that at least means that you give a shit.

Better a novice who cares than a genius who doesn’t.

2. You’re growing.

You can’t grow without some level of pain (that’s probably why they call them growing pains).

Impostor syndrome is evidence that you are in an uncomfortable situation. You’re stretching yourself *just beyond* your expertise, and that’s a good place to be if you want to grow.

The second it stops feeling hard is the second you’ve stopped growing, and another word for lack of growth is…

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Zachary Flower

Teacher; Freelance Writer; Compulsive Programmer; Lover of Semicolons; Impostor.