The Great Pretender

Maybe it’s just me. But lately I’ve been worried if I am a fraud. More than that, I’m worried that I am a fraud and everyone will find out. * I am not, generally, an insecure person. I like to think I know myself well and accept my strengths and weaknesses. I offer aide with my strengths as often as I’m able and befriend others to compensate my weaknesses—both usually in service to accomplish a community project, or sometimes personal growth.

This past year or so has been an interesting and hard and remarkable space of time. Life has offered up a package of great loss and enormous mistakes, and strange opportunities of chance that I have both wept over and clenched with fierce gratitude. Perhaps this is the same package offered to us all when youth flees.

The opportunities I have received—which seem incredible to me—have been given due to merit, and because I have asked for them. I am not afraid to hear the word no, it is simply the road to take that leads to a yes, and when I finally arrive at one, it is always a genuine thrill.

And I’ve been lucky. I’ve had some amazing experiences lately. I am driven to show my appreciation by doing the best job I can in careful examination and honest submissions. I won’t waste an opportunity for anything less. But, I’ve noticed that as my thrills get more and more thrilling, when I shake someone’s hand I greatly admire, or sit across from them at a table, my innards are shaking in terror.

Now, you would never guess this about me in a million years. I am good at being composed, outgoing and attentive with others. These are not disingenuous things about my person. Yet, I am trembling at my core, not believing my good fortune, terrified I will squander it.

Several of my associates-turned-real-friends over the years have shared their own versions of disbelief and self-doubt. Accomplished, bright men and women from all industries will whisper their anxiety into my astonished ear, stunning me with their fears. I accept these universal struggles we share, and it bums me out.

Why is it in our nature to doubt and worry and feel discouraged about ourselves and our abilities? Why are we not secure in what is offered and what we can give? That we engage in the perpetual falsehood that we are just a smidgen away from real success; if we could just have a little more money, a bigger title, a leaner body—or extra followers, these things will validate us somehow. Never our own excellence.

When I am among people who I think to be brilliant and beautiful and wildly successful, and learn they too sit across from me in freight, I reject the possibility outright. Impossible.

Maybe it’s just me.

* There is a name for this phenomenon, appropriately called imposter syndrome.