Lessons Learned From a Battle For Self-Recognition
This is Part 3 of 3 of my summer reflection series, as a member of The Cansbridge Fellowship’s 2020 cohort. Pandemic circumstances have foiled our original programming, so I’ve taken up the exciting opportunity to participate in a fellow-run remote startup incubator. If you’re interested, Part 1 is available as a stream of consciousness about the first half of my summer, and Part 2 was a musing on film as a sales mechanism.
The Imposter’s Speech
“Flattering to name a syndrome after me —
Surely, this, I don’t deserve.
I heard you think I’m qualified
To breach this learning curve.
Well don’t listen here, but listen here!
I’m not the one you seek.
Anyone but me would do,
If you want the right technique.
When truth is luck, and luck is truth,
I could never be enough.
In getting what I want, I hope,
Guilt makes meat chew tough.
Fraudulent life, ambition’s rife,
I tremble to a degree.
Between the self-doubt and gross denial,
Success comes with a fee.
At confession’s end, I hear applause,
Realising my acceptance was but a thought.
I wonder how long until they discover
I’m exactly who they think that I’m not.”
In the ten-ish minutes that it took to scribble this rough draft of a poem down in April, I lost count of how many times I talked my accomplishments down over the last two decades. When Pentcho (an older, very cool McGill Cansbridge fellow) first asked me who I was, I felt my cheeks flush, and said something so painfully bland I can’t remember it — as if I didn’t know that he was really asking me why I made it into this fellowship. The issue was that although nothing had actually changed, I suddenly felt as if none of my achievements mattered, and blurted out whatever I could to not oversell myself. Clearly, I overshot the other way. I knew right then that I was entering another wave of imposter syndrome.
The Imposter’s Speech is a poem full of contradictions, declared by a narrator unsure of their reality. But creating the world within it, I not only got to be the speaker, but also the audience. There was freedom in seeing my internal struggle from a distant (and very dramatic) perspective. And so, I looked to the internet for more catharsis. As it turns out, a full session at GHC conference this year will be dedicated to this topic. Meanwhile, in an 8,000-member Facebook tech community I am a part of, there will be a new post every week where someone confesses to feeling like a fraud. Similar patterns occur on Reddit, Medium, even Tumblr. 70% of people have experienced imposter syndrome at some point in their lives. The fact is, I wasn’t alone at all. I was just one shy count in a sweeping pandemic.
The grand irony of feeling like an imposter is of course the never-ending strive to prove that I am not actually an imposter. I attach this monumental burden onto some arbitrary goal, because somehow I’m conditioned to see external validation as the metric for my performance in life. Surely, I tell myself, if I don’t hit this goal, it’ll mean that I’m not worth very much at all. But deep inside, I know that hitting this goal will only give me brief respite. I’ll soon downplay my actions into believing that I somehow swindled or lucked my way into this achievement, or that the goal itself wasn’t challenging enough. Either way, I do not win. The cycle continues.
With some help, I recognised the urgency in which I needed to reconcile with my critical inner voice. In the same way my CFI team this summer would dissect our ideas, I began to question my underlying assumptions. Who was I proving myself to? Why do I need to prove anything at all? What makes an appropriate metric for life performance? How much do I have to achieve for it to be enough? I had no good answers. In working towards something that didn’t exist, I had cleverly set myself up to never fall into complacency. But, if there’s anything I’ve learned from being an Asian kid, it’s that there’s a fine line between tough love and abuse (especially the internalised, self-inflicted type).
Virtual counselling and self-love mantras did little good. So over the summer months, I tried to carve out what really spoke to me.
Run towards things, instead of away from them
Something special I observed from my cohort that I will remember absolutely forever, is that high ambitions and far aspirations are not tied to traditional career paths. Everyone I’ve met here is both a dreamer and a doer, but unlike notions of success from back home, this doesn’t need to entail starting a profitable company, or joining a profitable company. Some of us love spending time solo travelling, some want to make a beer truck, and some want to help small-scale coffee farmers in Mexico. This was a salient reminder of what success to me actually means—getting to do the things I care about.
You can’t think things into happening
The more time I spent thinking I didn’t deserve to be wherever I was, the less time I spent getting better at whatever I was doing. Compassionately and persistently practicing skills will sustain the learning curve, and end up making me better and more confident whenever in a high-stakes situation. Never mind the gnawing chance of failure, when there is a much bigger opportunity to grow. Besides, if something takes a lot out of you, it means you put a lot into it. That is worth being proud of.
The most radical thing that you can do is to respect yourself
I’ve faced put-downs, bullying, harassment, abuse, racism, and misogyny my whole life. I was made to feel small by systems in place and by some people around me, so there was no need for additional self-sabotage. Much of my self-doubt stems from experiences in my upbringing, but I’m no longer interested in letting ghosts limit my future. One of my favourite things I was told at the beginning of CFI was from Nicole, who told me that I was not only allowed to take up space, but was expected to. I’ll not forget that soon.
Thank you, Cansbridge. ILY, Cansbridge.
Our final incubator pitch competition/showcase happened at the end of July. With friends to my left and mentors to my right, support poured in from all sides of the fellowship. Gratitude seeped through every pore on my body, and I could see myself as a part of the crowd. I think my team killed it! But more importantly, I gave myself the courage to leave my opinions on what we had achieved this summer as just that — an achievement, no more, no less. Would I say the war is won? Not quite. Self-recognition, like most skills, is an ongoing process. But I can tell you that at 6pm that day, it felt like the sun had just risen.
