Fighting the Impostor
“Impostor syndrome can be defined as a collection of feelings of inadequacy that persist even in face of information that indicates that the opposite is true. It is experienced internally as chronic self-doubt, and feelings of intellectual fraudulence.
It is basically feeling that you are not really a successful, competent, and smart student, that you are only imposing as such.”
- “The Impostor Syndrome,” Cal Tech Counseling Center
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I didn’t learn the term “impostor syndrome” until the summer before my senior year of college. It happened after a day of fourteen straight hours of standing at a lab bench, bent over my sample tubes. After the pain in my shoulder became too much to bear, I turned to the post-doc who was doing his work on the bench next to mine and complained about how useless it all seemed.
“This isn’t even going to go anywhere,” I huffed, rubbing the sore spot near my neck.
Kevin gave me a strange look, as if I’d grown a second head. “You know, you’re doing some of the most impressive undergraduate research that I think I’ve ever seen. Even if it doesn’t get published, you’ve got that on your résumé.”
I shrugged off his comment. If only he knew that I wasn’t nearly as smart as I seemed. “You could train a monkey to do this.”
Kevin gaped at me some more. “Well there’s a classic case of impostor syndrome for you.”
At the time, I laughed off his comment, but I asked him what that meant. He told me that it meant that I didn’t feel like I deserved praise for my achievements, and that I wasn’t really as bright as people thought I was. Basically, I felt like an impostor.
Like any kind of diagnosis, finally learning the name of it eased my mind. I wasn’t the only one who felt like I was in way over my head, that I wasn’t nearly as smart as my peers and I didn’t belong in the same room as many of them. Of course, there was no real reason to believe that I was any less qualified to do my work than even some of the graduate students.
I’d never struggled with feeling inadequate before college, but once it took root in my brain, the syndrome infiltrated multiple aspects of my college life, including my writing.
One of my first major paper assignments in college was to choose a family photograph and write about not what the image captured, but what was not seen, what the picture effectively concealed. I wrote mine about how my family seems to be so close knit when we are judged by the photos we appear in together, but in the end we’re just a group of people who have learned to fake smiles together. The paper itself wasn’t that special. When I read the work of some of my peers, though, I realized that they had much more important things to say about their photos. One person had a mother who was hiding her fight with cancer through her smile. Another talked about his relationship with an estranged sister. I felt like my essay couldn't have the same impact.
Students at Michigan are some of the brightest in the state; some even say we’re among the brightest in the country. I came to college excited about this. Admittedly, I didn’t take it too seriously. I figured that I could easily keep up with my peers, maybe even perform better than them on most assignments. I thought that attending class with smarter people would be a refreshing change from high school. That paper showed me that I was not special. My peer review group members all had insightful things to say, and reading their papers made me second guess my own work. This was the first time I’d ever lost confidence in my intellectual ability, and it only got worse over the next couple of semesters.
As a science major, I faced several hard classes. I also participated in research, which sometimes was difficult for even the undergraduates on the projects to understand. The harder my work and my classes became, the more I questioned whether or not I truly belonged there. When I began the minor in writing in the winter of my sophomore year, I wondered if I was even going to be able to write at the same level as the other students in my cohort. As a result, the beginning of each paper had me thinking things like:
I wish that I had something more profound to say. I wish I were wittier. Surely, someone much brighter and more qualified should take on an issue like this.
These thoughts invaded my work, and are especially apparent in my repurposing project in the Gateway course for the writing minor. I aimed to repurpose my original family essay that I mentioned above for a different audience: adoptive parents. I wanted to say that family isn’t always what we think it is or want it to be, and I did it through a fictional blog post from an adoptive mother. Perhaps my lack of confidence isn’t evident in the piece itself, but it’s all too obvious in my drafting process.
Originally, I wanted to write a short story from the point of view of an adoptive mother, and that’s how I wrote my first draft. Even though my peer review group assured me that the story was believable and that I was on the right track, I second guessed myself and changed my final draft to a bland BuzzFeed-esque article that I deemed to be a safer choice.
I wrote about the frustration in my “How I Write” essay at the end of the Gateway course.
“I couldn’t seem to find the voice I was looking for. Instead of trying to work with my already completed draft, I wanted to scrap it. This wasn’t what my peers told me when I brought my draft in to peer review, but despite their encouragement, I couldn’t bring myself to keep what I had.”
--Gilbert, “Another Question I Don’t Have the Full Answer to,” (2014)
My complete lack of confidence affected this project and many more of the things I wrote for the Gateway course. Even in my “Why I Write” essay, I argue that I don’t have a particular reason to write, it’s just an urge I have. I compare it to the urge to sleep. I never mention having any particular skill.
When I took English 225, Academic Argumentation, I really started to worry. How was I supposed to put an argument together if I didn’t think that I was even qualified to discuss a topic? I knew that my arguments would end up much weaker if I didn’t think I knew enough to make them. Sure enough, I completely botched my first paper about whether Superman was a communist or not. I didn’t have a bold enough statement, and the paper didn’t really take a stand until the very last paragraph:
“Superman was never intended to be a super powerful being who struck fear into the nation’s heart. No, the character was always meant to be the hero that people wished could exist, the one they wished could save the damsels in distress and enforce justice when our system failed.”
Gilbert, “It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s…a Communist?” (2014)
Finally, my professor addressed my problem to the class. Apparently I wasn’t the only one afraid to make bold claims. She told us that we have just as much right as anyone else to talk about and argue for our own opinions on any subject. She knew we didn’t have Ph.Ds. We were to use the experts’ writings to our advantage, not try to become an expert for an assignment.
This gave me a bit of renewed confidence, and for the next essay, I wasn’t afraid to disagree with someone who seemed to know quite a bit more about his topic than I. In the paper, written about the theme of escape in the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay by Michael Chabon, I use a graduate student’s essay as a platform for disagreement. My main idea was that his argument was flawed, and that his claim was wrong:
“Alan Berger finds the fact that Joe Kavalier does not have a firsthand account of any concentration camp troubling, and implies that he is not a true survivor of the war, noted by his use of quotation marks around the word “survivor” on page eighty-one. He says that this works to distance the Holocaust from American concerns. However, Joe’s escape has less to do with America’s involvement, or lack thereof, in the war, and more to do with showing that even if he could physically get away from it, he could never escape the mental and emotional trauma caused by loss that so many others also endured that was directly brought on by the war.”
Gilbert, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: Attempting to Escape the Inescapable,” (2014)
I wasn’t afraid to really contradict Alan Berger in my essay, and this worked to strengthen my argument and my confidence. I got compliments from my professor about the sections of the essay where I actually tore down an argument that Berger made and replaced it with my own logic. I was bold in saying that the “expert” was misguided, and strong in my own opinions. It seemed like things were looking up for me. I was going to be able to write meaningful things, after all.
That paper wasn’t a cure-all, but it put me in a better mindset. I began to enjoy writing again, and to enjoy criticizing the work of others. However, I was still aware that many of my peers were likely better writers than I, and I tried my best not to let the thought dishearten me. I told myself that they weren’t necessarily better writers, just different writers.
My next class, Art of the Essay, presented a new obstacle. In this class we were going to be writing about our own experiences, which was fun, but also difficult for someone who believed she was utterly unremarkable. Many of my essays flopped because I was only writing to satisfy a prompt, and I didn’t think my personal experience could communicate something important. It seemed like I wasn’t the only person struggling with this, but a few of the essays I read during peer review blew me away. At the beginning of an essay, I began thinking less about the material itself and more about how I wanted to come across: witty, smart, profound. I would think about the way one of my peers sounded and attempt to write like him or her.
Even the advice of Strunk and White, to find meaning in even the simplest of things, couldn’t help me. I wasn’t special, and I didn’t have any meaningful experiences.
At the end of the class, I was struggling with my lab job and in my other classes, and I was getting fed up with everything. I poured my frustration into my last paper, an exploration of how science had always been my “thing” and an investigation of whether or not I wanted to pursue it anymore. Before I even turned it in, I was proud of it. It was an important message:
“Perhaps my relationship with science, much like many romantic relationships, has run its course. Typically, when the shininess wears off and the excitement fades, there is still love of the work to keep a person going. Without the true love for neurobiology, experiments become exhausting. The second hand of the clock drags as I wait for the end of the day. My thoughts are preoccupied with the aching of my feet resulting from running around the lab attempting to complete several different things at once. When I get home, I refuse to think about anything having to do with my work. The excitement is gone, and there is nothing to take its place.
Sometimes experiments fail, and this often tells us more than if it had succeeded.”
Gilbert, “Lessons in Research, In Life,” (2015)
I wanted to believe that it was okay to choose a different path than the one in front of me, and this essay convinced me. I thought that if I could convince myself, then others might also be swayed. I didn’t do as well grade-wise as I’d hoped, but it really didn’t matter to me anymore. I’d learned that I didn't have to stay on the same path for the sake of keeping my identity as the "science girl," and that was enough for me.
After realizing that impostor syndrome had been affecting my work in my classes and could be traced through my writing, I tackled a class in which we wrote about scientific topics for a variety of audiences. I learned the most in this class, and rediscovered a passion I have for communicating science to the general public. It presents a new situation in which I can talk confidently about something to an audience that is (hopefully) interested in the topic. I think because the writing is so challenging, I wasn’t worried that my writing would pale in comparison to that of my classmates. I was too wrapped up in trying to make my essays understandable to worry about what they might write.
In the end, I was able to write an article about Epilepsy, a subject I’d spent three years researching, that would help aid understanding about the disorder and the need to continue researching it. In this paragraph, I try to explain in simple terms some of the things that happen to trigger seizures:
“There is a lot of electrical and chemical activity in the brain. Some chemical signals aim to excite brain cells, or cause them to send a signal to the next cell in line. Others are meant to inhibit brain cell activity, or tell the cell not to send any more signals. These activities typically exist in a delicate balance between excitation and inhibition. Epilepsy is a condition in which the balance leans toward excitation, making it easier to create spontaneous brain activity. A seizure is caused by this over-activity in the brain, but unfortunately, we don’t know what’s tipping the scales.”
Gilbert, “5 Digestible Facts About Epilepsy,” (2015)
Though this was one of the hardest things for me to write, I enjoyed writing it because the subject was important to me, and I wanted more people to understand it. It was partly this essay and this class that inspired me to do my capstone project about common misconceptions in science.
Even as I work on my capstone project exploring a topic near and dear to my heart, I'm struggling to allow myself to take authority. While I want to tell everyone about GMOs and doing research on topics before sharing articles and opinions, I feel unqualified in a way. Instead of focusing on this, though, I let myself tell the story through experts' opinion and articles that I knew were reputable sources. I found things that I disagreed with and stuck to dismantling them to strengthen my argument. Instead of asking people to take my word for it, I used other people's credentials to my advantage.
