Impostor syndrome — A constant need for validation, or a realisation of privilege?

I have a confession to make — every morning, I check my Instagram before getting to a news app. What better way to start the day than by looking at people on holidays, right? But occasionally, while your fingers are scrolling through posts and stories almost out of muscle memory (and your brain only half-heartedly looks at the sponsored pages that keep popping up), you see a post that is supposed to fire you up. The classic “#Monday Motivation” posts. The one where high achievers talk about their success, the mountains they’ve had to climb, the hours they’ve had to work, and the sacrifices they had to make to get to where they are. Are they inspiring and motivating? Resounding yes. Do they also make us sometimes feel like we are not doing enough? Like frauds? Unfortunately, that is a yes as well.

Impostor syndrome amongst millennials is hardly new. At some point in time, most of us have felt that we did not deserve the accolades we may have received, no matter how much effort we put in achieving them. We live in a constant fear that we will finally reach a peak — the final hurdle where everyone will realize that we are not as good or smart as everyone thinks we are. The phenomenon was first identified by Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes in a paper published in 1978. Clance and Imes realized that many high achieving women (including women had multiple PhDs, were excelling as students in their fields, etc.), were reluctant to “experience an internal sense of success”, and instead attributed their achievements to factors outside their control — mainly luck. This could have been for various reasons. The 80’s were not an easy time for women to succeed in the professional world. Maybe they were conditioned to think its “un-lady like” to be more successful than men, or that they have achieved their goals not because of their efforts, but because of positive discrimination. Whatever be the reason, the root remains the same — impostor syndrome makes us put ourselves in a vicious cycle that requires us to keep “proving our worth” to the world, to make us feel that we deserve the somewhat cushy life that we are living.

In their paper, Clance and Imes observed that women who feel like “impostors” typically fall into 2 categories, with respect to early family history. In one group are women who have always been labelled in their families as “sensitive” or “socially adept”, whereas their siblings or other members are regarded as the “intelligent” ones. This label implies that the immediate and/or extended family members think that she will never be able to achieve any tasks that her sibling can, regardless of actual intellectual ability. And so, the vicious cycle begins — the woman continues to be driven to find ways of getting validation for her intellectual competence, but on the other hand, also thinks her family may be correct and secretly doubts her intellect.

The other group consists of women that experience the opposite. From an early age, these women were told that they are superior in every way — the perfect precocious child who started walking and talking earlier than most, sailed through school with straight A’s, and accomplished every task that was presented to her with surprising ease. However, as the child grows up, she realises that she does, in fact, find it difficult to complete certain tasks. Due to these expectations, she begins to distrust other people’s perceptions of her, and starts to doubt her ability. She seeks validation by achieving it all — the corner office, the swanky car, and the ideal life, but still battling the fear that she will “be called out as a fraud eventually”.

While impostor syndrome is more prevalent in women, this is slowly becoming more and more of a gender agnostic issue. Since their childhood, men are raised and expected to fit the mould of what constitutes a “successful and responsible” man — high earning job, and the being the bread earner of the family. Because of this pressure, it is not surprising that many men sometimes feel hesitant in working in fields that do not come under the scope of this “macho” image of manliness, or which are less financially rewarding.

The situations and examples posed by Clance and Imes are still prevalent today, and many of us have, in some point in our lives doubted our ability to succeed. However, many of us (and I say many in the fervent hope that I am not the only one who feels this way) feel like impostors because of a new kind of pressure — privilege.

I spent a large part of my childhood in Mumbai and am immensely grateful for the support and encouragement my parents have given me. My childhood was wonderful. I was sent to good schools, joined tuitions, got enrolled at a respected law school, and thankfully, landed myself an associate position a prestigious law firm. My parents always taught me, and showed me by example, how far hard work and perseverance can take you. But then it hit me — do I deserve any of this, or was I just lucky that my family could grant me access to these opportunities?

My parents, like most parents, come from humble beginnings. My father moved around a lot as he moved up the ladder, and my mother moved with him — just the 2 of them, against the world. Together, they fought through each battle that life through at them — moving 15 houses in 15 years, bad landlords, failures at work, along with the mammoth responsibility of having to provide for a family. By the time they turned 30, my parents had had my sister and I, and the need to hustle only increased. Somehow, even as they pushed through all the challenges that life threw at them, they always ensured that my sister and I had access to every opportunity that we wished to seize, and never let us know what they were sacrificing to give us exactly that. It is no exaggeration that I am where I am only because of my family. But I do very often wonder — Am I a product of my ability and skill, or of my surroundings, which allowed me to have those skills in the first place?

We live our whole life believing that in order to achieve something meaningful with our lives, we have to kill ourselves for it. That we must give our blood, sweat and tears, even if the world presents us with an easier way to achieve the same result. And so, we belittle our successes, our achievements, because we are unable to accept any success that did not come with an equal amount of sacrifice. We fall victim to the voice in our head that says, “Do I deserve this more than the next person, or did I just get lucky because I didn’t have the same obstacles in front of me that he/she did?”

To make matters worse, the ongoing pandemic also exacerbated the feelings I had about “being a fraud”. Every day, we watched the news talking of daily wage earners struggling to find jobs, and people who lost their lives because they could not get to a hospital on time, while I was lucky enough to be able to work from home. When me and my family tested positive (and thankfully got out of it with no significant complications), the weight of privilege pressed on even higher — I could afford to quarantine at home, get my mother to a hospital, and take 14 days off from work. A very large part of our country could not. All this time, I kept thinking “the only reason you survived this pandemic is because you are very, very lucky”. I still do. I remember the day we tested negative — my mother made me pray. I am not a very religious person, but that night, I prayed. I prayed to express my immense gratitude, and more importantly, I prayed to feel less empty about the horror our country was going through.

Impostor syndrome makes us unable to internalize and accept success, but that is only because we are conditioned to believe that success only comes one way — the hard way. And while that it is true, the definition of “hard way” can mean different things for different people. In a world where we are conditioned to strive and keep pushing to our breaking point — it helps to sometimes celebrate the small victories, and to pat yourself on the back and say “Hey — you did okay”.