Have you ever felt that you don’t deserve the things that you have accomplished or to be praised for something that you have done. Do you, at least at times feel like an imposter trying to fit into your role as a manager or teacher or life-partner or parent? You might not know this, but everybody in the world feels the same way. And we actually have a name for this weird experience; imposter syndrome. But how can it be weird if it is all too common? Just to get things into perspective, all of us excrete. And it is not out of fun, it is a necessity. But still, we don’t usually talk about it even with our close friends or spouse. It is just the way it is. However, excretion works for us because there was a time when we didn’t feel uncomfortable talking about it and we were taught to do it by our caregivers. But there are feelings we experience only after we grow up that we don’t usually disclose to anyone. We just don’t know anything about those thoughts and feelings, whether they are normal or do you need medical attention, whether everyone else feels the same way or are you the product of a mutation.
Sorry for the derailment. Getting back to the topic in hand, all of us feel that we are incapable of greatness or success, even when others believe that we have already succeeded. Just think about it, you have heard of Albert Einstein, right? Can you become as successful like him? Our brain is now showering us with reasons that suggest that we are idiotic, lazy, and unintelligent. Well, know this; Albert Einstein thought the same too. He didn’t feel he deserved the attention he received. According to me (obviously after reading up a couple of papers on the subject), there are two major reasons why we feel this way.
One, we feel that we are different from the people we idolize. Just think back into your childhood, as you and your friend were playing in the backyard with the newly bought Barbie doll, your parents were inside drinking tea talking about weather and politics. You must have surely thought why the hell they weren’t playing in the backyard with you until you come to the realization that these ‘role-models’ of your life are different from you. It is just hard for a child to actually see that even their parents were once their age and liked to play like themselves. Even after we grow up, we tend to feel different from other people. And with the advent of social media, this gap has widened beyond control. People see that other people on the platform are happy, judged on the basis of their recent photos. But ‘why am I sad?’; this question pops up. To fit in, they post a photo in which they smile. This affects some other people in the same way. Therefore even when social media is full of people smiling, we forget the fact that they just smiled to pose for the photo which took about a second. Whereas the remaining 86399 seconds a day, they could very well have been crying, who knows?
The second reason is that we know everything there is to know about ourselves and very little about others. The French philosopher Montaigne once wrote: “Kings and philosophers shit and so do ladies”. It is hard for us to visualize our favorite actor or writer shitting just like we do (I know that you are visualizing it, we just don’t usually do it). The thing is they all do it just like we do (at least I think so). The problem is we know ourselves from inside out; we know our darkest secret, most shameful thoughts, unacceptable desires, and so on. But what do we know about others? Only those things that they share with us. And what do ‘we’ share with others- the things that make us look good. So isn’t it only fair to assume that they too share the things that make them look good? So whenever we think of something that we wanna achieve, all those moments of weakness and shame and guilt come running back to us. And along with those feelings we see that the people who have already achieved the feet laughing all the time, securing scholarships and enjoying the company of other like-minded people. What we fail to see are the things that make us eligible to give it a try and what the so-called ‘succeeded’ do when the camera is out of the picture.
So the next time you decide to take a leap of faith, get it done because you are not that different from ones with those pretty faces in the Instagram posts and those intellectual comments below a youtube video.
