Imposter Syndrome

From the moment that I graduated nursing school, and to this day, I have this constant and nagging feeling that at any moment someone will approach me and ask just what I think I’m doing dressing up as a nurse. Someone will rip the badge off of the scrubs that I clearly borrowed from a real nurse and send me back to high school. Someone would find out that I had somehow tricked everyone into believing I was a professional.

You could go so far as to take a snapshot of me at my best work moments in the ICU, the OR, as a Charge Nurse and play them back to me. I would (likely) remember the moments and say “Oh yeah, I was a badass right there…” But that confidence in my ability is fleeting and unstable.

I wish it just translated into my work. When I was travel nursing, I ate plenty of meals at restaurants alone and saw many movies in theaters sitting by myself. However, there was this sense of “otherness” that permeated most trips out. I waited for someone to come up to my table and ask me why I was eating by myself and to tell me that it was against the rules to eat alone.  I waited for the couple in front of me to turn around and glare at my audacity for attending a movie without company.

Furthermore, even in my current romantic relationship I still struggle with the feeling of “I better enjoy this while it lasts… just wait until he finds out that I am not who he thinks I am.” Folks, I’ve been with my partner for four years. We have a house, a dog, wedding plans, family plans. He has seen me both physically and emotionally naked. He has seen me both achieve and fail on a colossal scale. If there is anyone in the world that knows who I really am, it is definitely my partner.

Until I attended a solid six months of psychotherapy with the right therapist for me, I thought that this was a completely standard experience. In regard to my work, I thought that the feeling would eventually wash off of me when I gained enough education or experience. This how I developed an obsession with improving everything about myself in an effort to make others see that I was worthy. If I worked more hours, if I had a certification, if I had a higher degree, if I knew the answer to every question… then surely I would prove to the world that I was not an imposter and that I deserved to be a nurse.

One of the first exercises that I remember completing with my therapist was a writing assignment: If you take away education, degrees, and titles - what gives you worth? During that assignment, I came to the (very wrong) conclusion that without all of that… I was worthless. If I am not a nurse, who am I, really? (Luckily for me, my next assignment was to make a logical argument with each of the points mentioned in the first assignment.)

The result of that session was that I realized that I have the pervading sense of “I am not ____ enough; I do not deserve ____.” My degrees, titles, and certifications were the armor I was using to prevent myself from having to face those thoughts and feelings head on. If I only just achieved… I could prove I was ______ enough, but then I would move the goalposts and have an even higher bar to achieve before I would let myself think I was _____ enough. There was always something to be, always some accolade to attain.

And with that came the terror that I would fail and that these imaginary judges would discover that I was, in fact, an impostor.

We’ve come to the end of the post, where I suppose I should have some sort of moral to the story or motivational outcome. The truth is, I still struggle with this concept. I have not “cured” this phenomenon from my life – and from what I read up to 70% of you readers will experience the phenomenon at least once in your life. What I will say is that what seems to be working is to speak to myself the way I would speak to a friend doubting their ability. I say things like “You worked really hard on this presentation, you should be proud.”

And when that doesn’t work, I let Teenage Maggie come out. Her preferred response is “Ah… fuck ‘em. You did your best.”

All my love,

Mags

Admission Order Set: The Name

When I was a small child, I remember my mother coming home from work with medical supplies for me to play with. In particular, I recall that she would bring home her facemask with plastic visor and I would take great enjoyment in parading around the house with it strapped to my tiny face. Now, let’s just skate right over the implications of letting a child play with potentially contaminated PPE… and think about how cute Maggie must have been running around the house telling everyone that she was going to be a doctor like her mommy. (Nevermind that my mother was actually a nurse on a trauma step-down unit – there are no such distinctions in the head of a three-year-old.)

When it came time for me to graduate from preschool to school, it wasn’t good enough that I wanted to be a doctor. Now these pushy adults wanted to know what kind of doctor I was going to be. What the hell, man? I’m five. How am I supposed to know that there are different KINDS of doctors? So, I told them I was going to be like the only doctor I knew - Dr. Pam, my pediatrician. Shortly thereafter, around the age of seven or so, I knew more about the world around me, and I KNEW I was going to be a psychiatrist. I wanted to help people who were sad.

It all went downhill from there, folks. My mental image of myself changed radically. Between ages eight and ten I was subjected to some fairly intense abuse of physical, emotional, sexual, and mental natures. After the court-ordered therapy that resulted from that time in my life, I decided that I HATED anything to do with mental health. I was still going to be a doctor, but psychiatry was out.

I kept up with the whole doctor thing until I was a freshman at state university. After my first semester, I took some truly bad advice, moved back home and gave up my lifelong goal. I took a tangentially related track and became a nurse through the local community college. (Just like my mother after all?)

However, I never felt done. The goalposts kept moving. As soon as my associates degree was done, I got restless. I finished a bachelor’s degree. I got restless again. I changed specialties. I got restless again. I decided that maybe I would feel fulfilled in leadership, so I got an MBA. I got restless again. I changed specialties again. I am now restless once more. (I can hear my therapist over in the corner mumbling something about comfort in chaos after trauma, but that’s a post for another time.)

So, here I am. This most recent chapter of my life has been about finding what makes me thrive, with the assistance of some very intense and rewarding psychotherapy. I’m grasping with both hands at the two things that make me feel fulfilled: writing and using my skills as a clinician to help others. I have completed the first of two applications to a doctorate program for nursing. I have outlined a humorous, but heartfelt book I would like to write about my experiences with trauma, complex PTSD, and borderline personality disorder entitled “My Trauma Loves My Cat”.

I have been a lifelong student. I am a nurse in my soul. I will be a doctor, eventually.

Welcome to the world: Dr. Student, RN – The blog that was created to explore mental health, trauma, and therapy.

I hope to crack open the fragile eggshell around those three topics with (sometimes biting) humor so that wherever you are in the world, for whatever reason you are reading this – you will know that you are not alone. There are many medical and professional journals that explore psychiatry, psychology, trauma, etc. Kudos to those incredible experts for constantly cultivating knowledge in a dynamic field.

I’m a little bit different. This blog is a little bit different. I am here in the trenches, still learning, still recovering. I am not an authority on the topic. However, I am a voice with raw, firsthand experience. Thanks for listening to that voice.

All my love,

Maggie

P.S. Wouldn’t you just KNOW that I came back to baseline and am pursuing the doctorate in psychiatry and mental health?