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Will You Please Stop With the Imposter Syndrome Stuff?
The first step to getting over it is to stop staying it
I’ve just been to a writers’ conference, and if I had a dollar for every time I heard that term — imposter syndrome — being bandied around, I could have paid for my conference fees.
It’s a term that has become very popular in writing circles over the past few years, and the weekend of hearing it over and over started to make me wonder why. Why do people use it? Is it a substitute for writer’s block? An excuse for not getting published?
No to both those options. Block stops you writing. It doesn’t stop you talking about it and confessing this syndrome thing. And even people who were published were using it.
What is it exactly? Here’s one definition — “To put it simply, imposter syndrome is the experience of feeling like a phony — you feel as though at any moment you are going to be found out as a fraud — like you don’t belong where you are, and you only got there through dumb luck.”
So writers of all kinds can say they experience it — in fact, most articles I read indicate the more successful you are, the more likely it is.
What the heck is going on? Why do writers get published (which is their dream after all) and then feel like they…
