Impostor.
“Yeah I bet a first time job is so weird! Do you have, like, issues with impostor syndrome?”
…
Heck yeah, one hundred percent.
One of my first meetings on the job, a peer asked me this over coffee. It took me a second to respond, as I didn’t know exactly what to say. Were they wrong? Absolutely not - and it wasn’t even the fact that their question was asked that caught me off-guard. It was how deeply this question sat within me that struck me. Impostor syndrome… yeah, I get that.
“Impostor syndrome”, as defined by Merriam-Webster, is “a psychological condition that is characterized by persistent doubt concerning one's abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one's ongoing success”. It sounds highly clinical, as I’m sure it can be for many people, but I do feel that our colloquial use of this term grasps our cultural understanding better - that is, that we use this term, but with less weight. Basically, it’s like this (in my brain, at least): I know I am doing well, but how in the world are real adults letting me do this?! I have to be failing. Or, like, someone is doing work for me. There’s no way I’m doing ____ (job, life, marriage, singleness, happiness, travel, etc.) on my own.
My personal favorite phrases, as of late, are “oh no, I’m just a baby” or “I’m basically a baby adult, I’ve got NO clue”. To my surprise, almost all of the people that I have met from 18-35 years old respond with something along the lines of “believe me, I feel like that too!” or “no one really knows what they’re doing!”. Of course, I respond in laughter, we move on, life is good. But, that’s leaving me with some questions about what it means for me to feel this way as an individual, and for us to feel this way as a demographic:
Okay, so first off - we all feel like this?! Why? Is it humility, or is it fear? A lack of self-trust?
What is this mindset doing to us? How are we being formed?
Number one: To the roots!
If any of you have either a) read a YA fiction book, or b) gone to counseling, then you know one thing - there is always more to an issue than what meets the eye. Whether you are talking about a pesky habit you have, or the “mysterious boy/girl” in whatever fiction novel you are reading starts to open up to the protagonist, chances are the topic of conversation is not the means to its’ own end. For example, a memory or situation from your past is linked to your pesky habit, and accessing this memory allows for you to deal with the issue and grow into a new rhythm. In the same way, the author of any good YA novel eventually lets on what caused the protagonist’s “mystery friend” to be so mysterious in the first place. The mystery is not there to be just that, “a mystery”, just like how weird habits are not there because you randomly decided you wanted a weird habit one day. There’s usually an underlying cause.
So what about feeling like an impostor? What’s the cause there? Honestly, great question. It could be a myriad of things - speaking from personal experience, I have my own reasons to think I am an “impostor" of sorts. Maybe you can relate to my list of “maybe’s”, as I’m still trying to find the roots:
Perfectionism (self-pressure, people-pleasing)
Rhythm switch (new job, new living space, new friends, new relationship status… any of these things)
Age
Culture and Social Pressure (big ambiguous words, I know, but just hear me out!)
Perfectionism:
I am, most definitely, a people pleaser. Some of that is self-induced: for instance, I liked making people smile as a kid. They would smile when I made them happy, didn’t smile if I did something they thought was bad… i.e., wash, rinse, repeat of helping to make other people happy. Other circumstances may force someone into a “pleasing” trend for survival, be it social, economic, or otherwise. It’s not all bad: relationships do take intentional stewardship, sometimes (if not often) at the sacrifice of our personal wants and minute needs. The problem is when this becomes a defined characteristic that one lives by.
Many of us are aware of the issues and confusion people-pleasing can bring, like dissatisfied relationships or feeling hypocritical (like you’re living a double life). These issues are often caused by - or motivated by - an underlying pressure. For instance, if my motivation is to “maintain a good look”, I will lie about how I really feel about a person in order to save face, leaving me with a shell of a relationship and some unfixed issues. Impostor syndrome fits right in here, specifically with the motivator of fear. Sometimes, our fear of what others are thinking about us can cause us to be deeply-seated with worry, and we start to ask ourselves questions of our ability or worthiness. Leave that worry in the mix long enough, and boom: you constantly feel like an impostor.
Speaking from experience, I would describe the feeling like this:
If I do not ________ (perform perfectly, get the best grades, go over and above at this task), everyone is going to know I’m a fraud.
Saying these things out loud makes me laugh a little - I mean, I thought this all throughout school whilst getting straight A’s. This kind of thinking caused me to believe one missed point would bring down on me a world of disappointment. What a bad place to be, am I right?
Anyone else feel this way?
Rhythm Switch
Big milestones and transition periods often have a much larger effect on our lives than we let ourselves believe. When you add a member to the family, or take one away, everything from your posture and eating habits to your dreams and tone of voice can change in an instant - often without any conscious effort to make that change. Personally, I never really thought about this until I experienced a constant transition between my college and my childhood home. The huge differences in culture, plus the jarring change in daily rhythms, was absolutely exhausting. Transitions towards bigger and better things can also have similar effects: for instance, getting a new job or living in your first solo-place are great things, until your energy dips and the responsibilities just keep coming. It is within this energy dip, where the newness of transition is not-so-fun anymore, were we can feel like an impostor.
At the beginning of this blog, I mentioned that my peer and I were talking about a new job I had JUST started (and I’m still only a few months in). I’m the youngest on the team thus far, and I’ve just graduated college (anyone else?) and now I have a big kid job with a big kid living space. Life is exciting and I get to make the decisions! Yet, I still find myself asking my coworkers a LOT of questions, and probably more than necessary. The truth is, there is that little voice in my head that cannot believe we are not in a class, only learning how to be an adult with a job - we ARE the adult with the job. What?! There is no way I know what to do in this job - someone is supposed to teach me!
This may resonate with you, or at least it once did. For many who are in the “emerging adulthood” phase, your transitions slowly take off the last reigns of dependency on the foundations that others had created for you as you grew in your childhood and adolescence. Your first steps into full(er) independence result in a life rhythm that is completely your own to dream, design… and manage. Responsibility without shared bearing can easily get overwhelming, especially in the beginning stages of learning how to carry your independence. A new job - the very first job - is quite different from the rhythm of a full-time education (or even part-time). Even with training, this “freedom” to work can daunt us, and make us question all of the work we did to be ready - I mean, are we really ready?
Age
It may be “just a number” for some, but oh BOY does that number carry a LOT of meaning for others! Here are a few examples of how age defines us:
Birthdays! 16? Driver’s license. 18? Adult. 25? Renting a car with reasonable paperwork. 40? Over the hill! 55? Technically a senior citizen. 33? Older saints in the church ask you why you aren’t married. (that’s a completely separate soap box rant for another day).
Birth years: The stereotypes built off of our generational trends are so, so common to hear. The news, social media, your hip new youth pastor… we all use terms like “boomer” and “Gen Z”. And oh, right now every parent of someone under 10 is so concerned about how “Gen Alpha” will turn out.
Expected level of education and social ability. Think about it… have you ever heard “oh wow, you are so ____ (smart, mature, etc.) for your age!”, or “ I know they are ___ years old, but they actually only have the mental capacity of a ___ year old”.
Our age defines us more than we think. That is why I love the Apostle Paul’s strong affirmation of his pupil Timothy in his first letter. I’ll quote the most recognizable line here: “Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12, NIV). For those of us in an “in-between” space - many who are 18-35 years old - your age is not often attributed to your wisdom. The sense that you are a fraud can come from the belief that you have no wisdom to give, and that you can only listen and learn from someone “better”. Sound familiar? Yet, listen to Paul: your age does not define the example you set, nor your ability to do that well. In other words, you’re not an impostor “playing smart” until you are 40 or whatever.
Maybe age is less of a defining characteristic than we give it credit for.
Culture and Social Pressure
I think that these pressures are a) interchangeable, and b) have too many categories to be covered completely in this blog. But here is an example to consider:
Imagine you are scrolling on TikTok, or Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts… whatever 5-second social media of your choosing, really. You are scrolling, and suddenly you come across that one couple who got married at 21 and has a big house in some southwest state, a kid, and videos from travel destinations that you can only dream of from your couch. I mean, who has time to edit content like that, AND do the dishes? Not I.
Whether we like to admit it or not, this instance may contribute to our feelings of failure. At least, that is how I am going to argue it - especially because I experience this all too often. Our social exposures and scenes have changed rapidly with the welcoming of social media platforms into our daily lives, even entire lifestyles (for some people). One development after another, we are hardly able to fully recalibrate to a new form of cultural communication before the “next best thing” is upon us. This means we are catching up when we finally get around to recognizing the downfalls of these social platforms - comparison being a particularly nasty one. It can be easy for us to see someone else who “has it all together”, and wonder what went wrong. Or, worse, we sneer and say to ourselves “it (money, happiness, perfection) would never happen to me anyway, because___” . We begin to lose hope in ourselves.
Now, I’m not saying that our hope is in TikTok success, or money, or a perfect vlogger lifestyle with sponsors from your favorite coffee company or whatever. And am I saying that you do fail if you do not live in some fashionable, seemingly-perfect way? Absolutely not. But I wouldn’t have to state these questions if a fear of failure in these areas wasn’t a relatable feeling. Let’s face it - subliminally, online social connection has trended more towards giving us isolation. Even in the good moments (making new friends, posting a good photo, finding memes, seeing your friends post some monumental life moments), we find ourselves isolated, afraid of missing out, and lonely (friends post an outing without you, you hate how you look in pictures, your “funny” content doesn’t fill you, and you feel FOMO for not being with your friends and sharing in their monumental moments). Yet we push on, pressured to “stay connected” as best as we can in fear of losing people. Or, we need to follow trends, and we post for self-validation that we are aware of what is funny, and therefore other people’s engagement with our content means that they care about us.
Inevitably, this will fail you. And when you compare yourself to everything “out there”, you feel that you failed. Not you at a job, or a project, or a conversation - but you are what failed. You don’t feel like yourself when you look at old posts of you smiling, or with family, etc. It feels distant, and you feel left out and guilty because of it. This is impostor syndrome, and it is ugly when we are alone with the world on a screen.
Number two: What are we becoming?
I specifically asked earlier in this blog the following question: “What is this mindset doing to us? How are we being formed?” I used the word “mindset” because I am unsure if this is exactly what impostor syndrome breaks down to, on a simpler level.
On one hand, it is intrusive and unfounded. We, whoever we are, have a life that we are actively living. We have relationships that are both good and bad, we have trained to do the work which we do, and we are able to be responsible for many things each day. Our ability to ask questions, offer and accept help, to emote, pray, and grow… it all points to a fuller capability. So, what we must be stuck in when we think we are an impostor is simply a false mindset, right?
On the other hand, the word “mindset” can imply that it is something a person can change within themselves easily - that it is simply flexed, altered, or dropped when decided that this framework of thinking is no longer useful. So, do we simply all happen to create this thought process when we feel a certain way? Does it serve any purpose? Is it within our power to completely control this intrusive and unfounded worry that we are failing? I don’t know about that one, either. I am left with many questions on both, and I offer these options for you to consider.
Regardless of what impostor syndrome “is”, it obviously has some power to form our ways of thinking and believing. And when we sit in anything like this for too long, we are (de)formed by it. In my own life, the lie that I am a fraud within my own career and family sinks deep. It caused - and still causes - me to question if I am truly valued, or just valued out of pity. Or if I deserved “success”, really, because maybe it was just a handout to keep me at bay. And then, because I am so nervous about me, the worry grows deeper as I’m stuck inside of my own head. Am I good enough to even keep this job, relationship, responsibility or promise? What if I haven’t done enough? What if God Himself thinks that? What if I’m a liar at my core? As you can see, this identified issue can grow roots so fast, that everything from anxiety to faith to your actual career can be affected. I’ve been here. I was formed into a worried, lonely person.
Now, I don’t know exactly what impostor syndrome “forms us into” - I can only speak on my behalf, and what I interpret and observe. I would argue that we are all being malformed by impostor syndrome; we believe we are not enough to even be ourselves. I’m not entirely sure. But, I do know Scripture, and I think some very familiar New Testament texts resonate deeply with this. Here are my quick adlibs (but I recommend you read these for yourself):
Matthew 6:25-34 - do not worry. for what can that add to your life - an hour? a success? no, but trust in the Lord.
Excerpts from Ephesians and Colossians - could you earn your standing with God, and fail at it and lose it? No. Your faith is not determined by what you do. And what if you fail because it’s who you are? No - for here, there is no divide. We are all one in Christ Jesus.
These are a few that many of you have heard, I’m sure. It’s nothing new to reference the Sermon on the Mount or Paul’s Epistles for encouragement. But the truth does not have to change like our challenges do. To be fooled into believing we are an impostor in our own lives is a crafty lie, with narratives spinning every which way to distract us. Let these Scriptures ring true once more as you read over them, forming yourself in the way and the Word of God.
—
Be encouraged, brothers and sisters. You are growing, not failing. You are living well and working hard, not faking things and somehow passing. Although we all may split from here still feeling like an impostor, know that you do not have to hide. Brother, we are here with you! We are not alone in our struggle - and for that, I praise God.
—Delaney
For those of you who do not know me, hi - my name is Delaney Odle, and I just got hired at College Wesleyan Church as the Assistant Director of College and Children’s Ministries. I graduated from Taylor (lol, surprise!) with a degree in Worship Arts, and my husband and I are now living and working in Grant County. Part of my job includes the gift of talking with brilliant alumni from our church and surrounding schools, and placing what God has given them into formats like mentorship opportunities, leadership teams, and now on a platform like Liminal Foundation. Their works are inspirational, and this wealth of knowledge is something that I am blessed to be learning from every day. Thank you for being committed to learning, growing, and living faithfully. God bless you.