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