Are You Really An Imposter?
What if imposter syndrome is just an imbalance? What if it’s just dissonance with the idea that greatness must come from hard work? What if the thing that makes us feel like an imposter is simply an accomplishment that society deems valuable, but you yourself don’t value it… what if we just don’t care as much as we’re expected to? Might that contribute to a disenchantment with said accomplishment that could lead to feeling like a phony?
If you achieve something, like a college degree for example, and you look back and don’t perceive the achievement of that as having been difficult, does that make your degree fake or undeserved? Does the struggle of others measure the validity of your achievements? What if you simply don’t care that much about a college education? Does that make your degree less valuable? Only to you, I think.
Why must we always compare ourselves to others and then judge worthiness (of them or yourself) based on that perception? You make a series of choices that lead you to a series of experiences that lead to the actualization of a series of things.
As someone who has struggled with imposter syndrome for as long as I can remember, these thoughts are blowing my mind. I’m going to try to calibrate more effectively from now on. Surely, not all things are going to “come easy,” but maybe a lot of resistance means I’m in my own way. Maybe the path of least resistance is exactly right sometimes. A river flows the direction of the current, after all.
Of course, that calls into question the source of the current… whether we’ve set the current at a certain speed and direction, and whether that trajectory should be re-evaluated. But that’s another tangent for another time.
But really… let’s go easier on ourselves. We all deserve greatness. If you feel like you’ve accomplished something great, you have. If you feel like you’ve accomplished something that other people think is great, but you find mediocre, then… okay. Why does that need to mean you’re somehow an imposter? Doesn’t that just mean you should just start looking toward achieving the things that you DO find great? Let’s start measuring greatness by how intensely we love things… by how much light with which it fills us. What tool measures light? A quick google search tells me that’s a photometer. Let’s be better at developing our own photometers.
