“There are things in your childhood where you have to say what your name is and pretend you’re a person, but I’m still not really a person, and I never really had to be a person in that way, because I feel like this other way of understanding the world makes more sense to me.”
Some of the smartest people I know battle with chronic doubts about their intelligence. Some of the most original and ingenious minds I’ve encountered consistently worry their innovative perspectives are contrived and obvious.
Why can’t we do it?
Self-doubt tells us that we’re not good enough, that we’ll never be good enough, and that everyone else knows how to do all the crap we fear we’re unable to do.
Everyone suffers from a degree of self-doubt at some point. Should we take the time to trace back to that first taste, we’d likely find ourselves in childhood.
There are others who made it all the way to adulthood before the first rush of self-doubt came to claim them. Like many traits, there are healthy and unhealthy forms of self-doubt. If it is the first thing to flare up in the face of a new challenge, if it fuels your procrastination and indecision, then you are probably struggling from an over-inflated sense of self-doubt.
GETTY IMAGES | Westend61
For much of my life, I’ve been convinced that there is a right way to be a human being, and that I’m doing it wrong.
Many of the rules I learned about intelligence, I was taught by observing the behavior and actions of the adults around me—the message I received was that information equaled intelligence, and retaining facts and figures meant you were smart.
Based on these ideas, I understood that I was not smart. My brain, after all, was not made from the soft earth where facts and figures took root. I learn by doing. I must experience, live through, visit, touch, or see the thing working in real time to truly understand its machinations. The American system of teaching kids who sit all day was counterintuitive to the way I learned.
I am not a one-size-fits-all person, and most of our systems are built upon the one-size-fits-all model. The agenda behind America’s whole-cloth educational system was eugenic in nature. Its aim was to sift and sort; to classify and order human worth. Its ultimate goal was to establish a superior white race. The standardization of tests (including the SATs) and other norms were created by highly privileged and educated white men who wanted to maintain the white race at all costs.
What does eugenics have to do with self-doubt, you might be asking?
It’s to illustrate the systems inside which we were raised to operate. The ones that gave rise to the fallacy that there is one right way to be a person, that there exists such a thing as superiority and inferiority, that society is built on this binary. But, this idea that there is such a binary feeds our self-doubt. It begs us to compare ourselves to others, to wonder whether we are better or worse. We’re rewarded when we win, and often filled with shame when we don’t.
These indicators of our success or failure try to disabuse us of the truth—that they are best left as internal measures for each individual to decide. There are imaginary timelines against which we plan our lives, and upon which we are judged as having succeeded or failed. Should you fail to reach a milestone “in time” or simply bypass it altogether, you will discover your self-doubt reinforced everywhere you look.
GETTY IMAGES | Malte Mueller
While many of us don’t reach all, or any, of these milestones on the invisible timeline, and more and more people are choosing to become single parents, or opting out of marriage and/or children altogether, the sense that we’re “outsiders” remains. This creates the sense that we’re getting life wrong and we are often filled with doubt about our ability to be human.
Without comparison, self-doubt could not exist. So long as we compare ourselves to and against others, we will always find ways to come out feeling better or worse about ourselves. There is simply no category where individuality and difference IS the norm. That would allow too much room for everyone.
So how do you know whether or not you suffer from self-doubt?
Do you have trouble taking compliments?
Do you require a lot of reassurance from those around you?
Do you often feel as though you’re not good enough?
Do you have a low regard for your sense of self?
If you answered yes to more than one these questions, you are most likely grappling with self-doubt
When people who fall outside the “norm” compare themselves with others who are achieving in the traditional sense, those outside can’t help but question their own worth. But when the thing that’s desired actually happens, and you are placed in a more public arena, or you are promoted, or win a prize, the struggle with self-worth might elevate and become a much more prominent feature in your everyday life.
When we begin to respond to our self-doubt in maladaptive ways, we hold our false beliefs about ourselves in place, freezing them, instead of allowing them to grow and therefore change. Self-doubt can find itself giving rise to self-handicapping behaviors like procrastination, perfectionism, and or other self-sabotaging behaviors. When this occurs, it’s a signal that your sense of self has become confused with ideas about your competence.
Original art for How to Live by Edwina White
Even the most idealized (perhaps, especially the most idealized) artists struggle with self-doubt.
They wonder if they truly deserve to be where they are, if they are worth the accolades they’ve garnered, or the money they’ve earned. Toni Morrison was one such luminary who doubted whether she was as good as others claimed. This uncertainty about the merits of success is tricky business because it forces us into business that isn’t our own, and that is trying to see ourselves from the point of view of others.
Are we as capable as they think we are? Do we match the image they’ve projected upon us? No, we don’t. We never will, and it doesn’t matter. It’s not our business, nor is it worth our time to try to be whom we imagine others think we are.
When we begin to question ourselves in this way, we are attempting to see ourselves through the eyes of those we don’t know and have never met. We have the sense of being fraudulent and we fear we’re going to be found out. We trap ourselves in a mental loop of our own making, imagining the expectations other people have for us (and we’re most often wrong), and then we measure ourselves against those arbitrary, imagined expectations.
Or someone else in our arena wins an award or is invited to participate in a festival, and we might automatically take that as evidence that we are falling behind, or that we’re not worthy.
Because we exist in a world that is modeled upon traditional benchmarks, we can't help but create the metrics and expectations we imagine others have for us, and then we worry we’re not matching that imaginary expectation. We are creating the infinity loop inside which we get stuck. We do this whether we are feeling ahead or behind.
We measure ourselves based upon the same imaginary metrics, regardless of what part of the spectrum our self-worth rises or falls. Those who experience their success as the causative outgrowth of luck, connections, or something outside of their own natural ability are constantly waiting to be found out. Most people recognize this description as imposter syndrome (or imposter phenomenon, which is the preferred term).
An imposter is someone who pretends they are something they are not in order to deceive others. Someone who suffers from imposter syndrome FEARS they are going to be outed as a person pretending they are someone they are not, and worry that people will feel deceived. It’s a fear of fooling others because you doubt your own competence.
Imposter phenomenon is particularly crippling because embedded within the experience is the knowledge that the accolades are all temporary. At any moment, you could be revealed, and then stripped of the awe and wonder of your audience.
We can’t control how people perceive us. Some may elevate us, others may underestimate us. Whatever the case, we can never truly match any one else’s expectation or perception they have of us, nor should we try. What matters is our standard that we hold for ourselves and whether or not we are meeting it.
Living life according to the standards of other people is not living your life truthfully, it’s (wait for it) living life as an imposter.
We are imposters only when we aren’t being true to ourselves. We are not imposters when we fear others will expose us for being frauds because we doubt our own luck or ability.
There is one thing about this phenomenon I think many of us overlook: We all suffer from it. At any given point, we are pulling back from achieving the next level of success for fear that we don’t deserve it, or we’re already at the next level of success and questioning whether we really do deserve it. It never goes away.
And because we all suffer from it, I wonder, if I may refer back to the Laurie Anderson epigraph, whether the self-doubt we have is not a fear of our level of competence, but a concern that we aren’t being perceived by others the way we perceive ourselves. Perhaps we fear being exposed not for being frauds, but for not being able to ever be who other people think or imagine we are.
Trying to live up to other people’s standards is not a great use of our time. Trying to live up to the standards we IMAGINE other people have for us is even worse.
What if, instead, we could all embrace the fact that it’s the standards we have for ourselves that matter, and that those standards do not need to be the same day in and day out.
When we imagine the realistic goals we have created for ourselves and try to live up to those, then we can decide those are the ones that really matter, because they conform to who we are and what we know we can achieve. Write down the standards and expectations you have for yourself, and then focus on trying to meet them.
And you?
Do you suffer from self-doubt? In what ways, and in what situations, have you felt fraudulent?
Let me know in the comments!
Until next week I am…
Amanda
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