Mr. Syndrome Asks For Help
What happens when Imposter Syndrome needs help with his writing?
There’s a knock at the door, but I don’t move. I’m watching the steam rising lazily from my tea as the golden light of the setting sun floods the living room. Beyond the gray lines of steam, a full-length mirror shows a meek man at the table, an open laptop at his side. That’s me. My eye catches the laptop and the list of unfinished drafts on the screen makes me shiver.
There’s a knock again, stronger this time. I leave my tea behind and drag my feet across the living room to the door. When I open it, I see a man in a tuxedo. Before I can close the door, he barges into the living room, throwing a soft “Thank you.”
“Oh, no! Not you again,” I say.
“What?” he says, opening his arms. “I even knocked this time.”
“You’re not welcomed here.” I hold the door open. “You already convinced me I’m a terrible writer. I’m completely paralyzed, can’t press the damn submit button on any of my drafts. Now, please, leave. Just disappear without explanation like you did last time. You won.”
“I know,” he says, checking himself out in the mirror. Then he turns to me. “But something happened. I need your help.”
I’m befuddled. I look out the door as if someone out there could help me understand what’s going on.
“You, Mr. Syndrome, needs help?” I do a full turn, looking in all directions just to make sure there’s really nobody else here. “From me?”
He puts a hand inside his tuxedo as if reaching for a gun and I cover my face.
Instead of a gunshot, I only hear his voice saying, “You need to help me.”
When I open my eyes he’s holding a black notebook, the orange sunlight reflecting in the expensive leather.
I recompose myself and stare at the notebook until it finally clicks. “Forget it.” I dismiss it, waving my hand. “I won’t give you more writers’ names so you can put them in your creepy black book of targets.”
“What? No! This is where I prepare for my visits.” He pulls a chair and sits down at the table. He opens the notebook and starts leafing through it. “I write all of my lines in this notebook. Do you think getting into people’s minds and manipulating them is easy? No! It requires planning. I write, rewrite, cut, edit… until only the meanest stuff survives.”
“Wait a minute,” I say, pinching the bridge of my nose. “Are you telling me you, Imposter Syndrome, write?”
He doesn’t answer, just shakes his head. “Today was a horrible day. I visited lots of writers, but none of my lines worked.” He looks at me with desperate black and golden eyes. “Writers are mean!”
This is surreal. My brain starts connecting things and the fact that Mr. Syndrome is sitting at my table starts making sense — even though his job of obliterating my confidence in my writing is already done. But there’s still a piece missing.
“Why me?” I ask.
“Yesterday I got you to doubt your skills. Only you can help me figure out what has changed. What am I missing? Could you help me?”
I look at his notebook full of mean lies about people’s writing, then at my laptop full of unpublished drafts. Then I close the door.
“Alright,” I say with a shrug. “Do you want some tea?”
He cringes at the offer. “Could you make me a martini?”
“That’s gonna be a hard no, sorry.”
He waves his hand impatiently. “Nevermind. Just sit down and help me.”
I do as he says — since, apparently, this is how things work — and sip from my tea. I can see his back in the mirror, arched forward as he studies his notes.
“So here’s some of the stuff I’ve been using without success,” he says, pointing at the notebook. “First I visited Jann and said ‘My name is Syndrome. Imposter Syndrome.’ But he said that was lame. Lame! Then I told Kathy nobody cares about her writing, and she basically said she doesn’t care what I think, so, like, what am I even doing here? Then I was very obnoxious with Sam and, again, she didn’t even care. So I dumped all my rage on Selina, and she called me ‘half-mad!’ I mean, yes! I was quite frustrated at that point, what did she expect?”
I’m hiding a large smile behind my cup of tea and hoping I don’t make a sound.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” he says, shaking his head. “All this used to work. Now it’s like I’m not even real.”
I clear my throat, trying to get rid of the smile before I put the cup down. “Well, what else do you have in that notebook?”
“Alright.” He shuffles in his chair and produces a sleek pen. “I’m gonna start with the weak stuff. Are you ready?”
I nod.
He points at a sentence in the notebook and reads it out loud. “‘I really love when the characters in your stories die.’” He looks at me, eyes full of expectations.
“I don’t get it,” I say.
“Because I hate them all,” he says. “I was trying to say that I hate… oh, forget it.” He strikes that one out with a quick movement of the pen before reading the next one. “‘My 82-years-old grandmother can write better dystopian worlds than you.’ Oh, this one doesn’t work if the person is Margaret Atwood’s grandchild.”
He strikes it out before I can offer any feedback.
“Alright, next one, ‘All your stories make me cry. I keep thinking how sad it must be to be you.’”
I chuckle. “This one is very mean, but it’s kind of funny in its own way.”
He rolls his eyes and strikes out that one too. “I’m not trying to be funny here. This is serious business. Next one! ‘If I got a quarter every time I consumed bad writing, reading your stuff would make me rich.’ Oh, come on, Imposter! It’s like you’re not even trying.”
“Wait! No, no. That one is fine,” I say but he’s already covering it with black ink.
“I’m boring myself here!” He goes to the next page. “‘There are two kinds of people in the world: those who value their time, and those who read your stuff.’”
“Oh my god.” I cover my mouth. “That’s super mean.”
“Well,” he says, shaking his head, “you’re clearly just trying to make me feel better about my writing. But you don’t have to do that. This is garbage! Look at this one, ‘You’re like if [GREAT WRITER 1] and [GREAT WRITER 2] had a child, and the kid had a friend who can’t write. You’re the friend, just to be clear.’ I mean, look at this! I can’t even think of a writer’s name.”
“Right,” I say, “but you said you were gonna start with the weak stuff. Maybe let’s go to the good stuff now.”
“I lied!” He closes the notebook. “Don’t you see? It’s all garbage!” He drops his head to the table and his voice becomes muffled. “How can I do my job now?”
“Wait, everything you’ve read was good. I mean, it was very mean, but also very effective in making people feel bad about their writing.”
He raises his head to look at me. “Really?”
“Really! If anyone said any of those things about my writing I would probably never write again.”
He shakes his head. “You’re just trying to make me feel better. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No!” I’m louder now. “I mean it. Stop lying to yourself, saying your writing sucks, and trying to see others’ compliments through a lens that distorts them into irrelevance. You are good! You’re only unhappy with your work now because you want to be better, and that’s a good thing! That’s how I know you’ll always work your hardest to improve. But that doesn’t mean what you have now is bad. You have to stop doubting yourself. You’re just doing it because of your…” We lock eyes and say the next part in unison. “Imposter Syndrome!”
I blink a hundred times, impressed by my own speech. I look through the window and the sun is gone now, there’s only an orange sky, burning like the truth that is suddenly alight inside me.
When I look back at Imposter, he’s gone. Instead, I only see myself in the mirror, as if I was alone in here this entire time.
When I look down, I have a pencil in my hand and a notepad in front of me. There’s one sentence on the page. “I love reading your stuff. It makes me feel better about my own writing.”
It makes me chuckle.
This was a fun ride! Thanks, Jann Christoph von der Pütten for the awesome challenge, and thanks Kathy K, Sam W., and Selina Ahnert for fleshing out the character even further. The lesson here is: if you’re having problems with your writing, writing about it might help!
Ria Rees, L.A. Sauvette, and Sweet Chaos, not sure you’ve ever received a visit from Mr. Syndrome, but if you did, please tell us about how it went!
If you enjoyed this story, please consider supporting FJCMontenegro. When he’s not paralyzed by imposter syndrome or talking about himself in the third person, he writes dystopian and cyberpunk stories.
