By Lynn Ayoub | Staff Writer
You wake up every morning, get dressed, and mold yourself into a figuratively accepted reflection in front of your mirror. You put on your headphones, and blast music so loud that the only other sound you can hear is silence. You go on to survive another day in the wilderness, consciously weighing every glance, every movement, every sound so you don’t get caught. You try to be as invisible as possible because deep down you will never measure up. You won’t measure up to the star athlete with a 4.0 GPA, or the popular jock with a hot girlfriend and excellent swimming skills, or the friend who always seems to be expanding their horizons. Suddenly, your horizons seem so shallow, so close. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It doesn’t matter how many people think that you’re good. You still don’t measure up. You’re still missing; you’re still the imposter anxiously waiting for someone to tap you on the back or call your name and catch you in the act. You’re scared that they can see through you the same way you see right through you, that you will always be an angel, never a God. It’s a paradox, others believe in you while you don’t believe in yourself, yet you believe what you tell yourself instead of them. So, if you doubt yourself, why don’t you doubt your judgment of it? This is imposter syndrome, and the reason you should know about it is because you are not alone.
Michael Caine appeared in more than 160 movies. He’s known to be a British film icon and has received numerous awards, including two Oscars. In the 1960s, he was sitting across from the great Frank Sinatra, who is considered by many to have been the greatest American singer of the 20th century, on a flight to Las Vegas when he was dating Sinatra’s daughter at the time. Overwhelmed by the moment, he suddenly became tongue-tied and speechless. Sinatra said, “Mikey, what’s up? You scared of flying?” Caine admitted that he was feeling overwhelmed by the conviction that he didn’t belong in the famous singer’s presence. Sinatra then told him that he knew what he was feeling because he had experienced it himself when he was in the company of the Academy Award-winning actor Ronald Colman. So, you see, that’s how it is. “We all come from nobody and nothing”, as Caine commented later in a documentary about his life. The point is that, what Caine was experiencing, is called imposter syndrome, or fraud syndrome. It is the experience when high-achieving individuals find it difficult to internalize their accomplishments and believe in their worthiness. Some studies have shown that 70% of people, not only high achievers, feel like they are imposters at one time or another, that they are not good enough, and that they don’t belong where they are. That perhaps, they just happened to be there by mistake and that at any given time it will be taken away from them.
Imposter syndrome originates from a disconnection from oneself, as some psychologists have suggested. It’s about the quality of our relationship with ourselves, and how well we connect and harmonize with our inner self. It goes back to the fact that the mental spectrum doesn’t measure happiness by the amount or achievement of success; it’s the degree to which you can feel your inherent goodness, in which you know and appreciate yourself at the intrinsic level. There is always an inner conflict that acts as a stumbling block preventing you from reaching that level of connection with your intrinsic self. You have to become more aware of what that block is to be able to solve it. Mainly in imposter syndrome, the block poses as the conscious wish to be seen as an exceptional person versus the subconscious expectations associated with shame and being seen as a lesser person. It’s like having an annoying friend; however, this time in your mind, all they do is criticize and mock you about how your success won’t last. They’re the voice that whispers in your ear that soon you will collapse back into being nobody, and you pretend to be this superior version of yourself when it’s probably luck that got you this far. Eventually, that will run out too, and you will end up naked for everyone to see what you are. In the beginning, you might not be able to be conscious or realize what is going on because the criticism can be in stealth mode, and over time you’ll start feeling like an actual fraud after all the seeds have been successfully planted in your mind.
The syndrome can sometimes be accompanied by mood swings back and forth between euphoria and gloom. Actress Tina Fey described her encounter with the syndrome in these words, “The beauty of the impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania and a complete feeling of: ‘I’m a fraud! Oh God, they’re onto me! I’m a fraud!’ So, you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud.” Even though deep psychology still doesn’t recognize imposter syndrome as a mental disorder, it is nonetheless a disturbance of our emotional life. It can be traced to some aspects of our psyche that we ought to discover to be relieved of because it can produce self-defeating behaviors.
All the shine of a thousand spotlights, all the stars we steal from the night sky, will never be enough. Towers of gold are still too little; these hands could hold the world but it’ll never be enough. In the mind of that person, no matter what they do, it’s just not good enough. Jupiter still mourns because it was supposed to be a star; the stars believe they are just burning debris overpowered by the light of the moon, and the moon is just a floating rock reflecting light, overpowered by the sun. All of them imposters in their skin, all of them suffering, all of them never enough.