To begin with, my credentials are worthless. I’m no expert. A better writer should have gotten this assignment. My editor is ignoring my e-mails because my work is unpublishable and she’s just trying to find the nicest way to tell me. I’m not talented; I’ve just been lucky, and what will I do when that luck runs out?
Does any of this interior monologue sound familiar?
If so, you may be suffering from imposter phenomenon, which is the name for those sneaky feelings of inadequacy, despite actual evidence of professional success. The term was coined by psychologists Suzanne Imes and Pauline Rose Clance in the 1970s, after they studied a number of highly successful women who felt like frauds in spite of all their accomplishments. It’s a phenomenon—or a “syndrome,” as it’s often referred to these days—I’ve experienced firsthand.
To begin again, I could tell you that I’ve published two books, and have a third coming out this summer. I codirect a literary nonprofit organization, and have spoken on panels and given readings at events all over the country. I’ve published articles in magazines—including this one—before. And still I was surprised last winter to receive an e-mail from a painter who admires my poetry, asking if I would be interested in writing about her artwork. The fee she offered was higher than the advance I’d gotten on my first book. The essay could be as long, or as short, as I wanted it to be, and I had six months to write it.
So what was the catch?
The other two writers she’d commissioned to write essays included Staff Writer at Most Prestigious Magazine and Editor in Chief of Famous Art Magazine. I read their names and credentials over and over until I put myself into a sort of trancelike state of paralysis. I somehow forgot my identity as Published Poet and could only think of myself as Managing Editor of There Must Have Been Some Mistake. But what could I do? I needed the money, and I was also becoming more and more friendly with the artist, who was charming and delightful. How could I let down my new e-mail BFF?
For months—the entire spring—I avoided starting the essay. I had a good excuse, too; I was finishing my third book. Once that was complete, I procrastinated under the guise of “research.” I reread the chapters on “Modern Art in Europe and the Americas, 1900–1945” and “Art Between the Wars” in my college art history textbook. I obtained a Whitney Museum library card and spent hours in an excessively air-conditioned room near the Hudson River flipping through monographs and exhibition catalogues. I asked an art therapist friend to coffee so I could run my ideas by her and have her tell me I was an idiot, before I shared them with the artist herself. (Of course my friend didn’t tell me I was an idiot. She said I should just start writing.)
Following the procrastination, there was stalling. In June I e-mailed the artist, asking for additional images. In July I promised that I would send her a rough draft of my idea “soon.” I woke up from a nap and it was August. The deadline was now a month away and I hadn’t written anything. One afternoon, innocently browsing a front table at a bookstore, I saw a newly released paperback by Staff Writer at Most Prestigious Magazine. What the hell was I doing? Maybe it was time to admit I was in over my head. I wrote an e-mail to the artist to say I was not worthy of having my work appear alongside that of the other contributors she’d chosen, and that I would have to ultimately decline her solicitation.
I saved the e-mail as a draft. Then I went to bed.
Imposter syndrome is not an amalgam of feelings I experience every time I sit down to write. Luckily I only have flare-ups when I’m working on the biggest assignments of my career, for significant sums of money. The higher the fee, the more undeserving I feel of earning it. And why is that? Maybe I worry that I’m abandoning my tribe of Serious Literary Writers, those who toil away on passion projects for years, by turning my work into a financial transaction. Or maybe it speaks to a larger societal issue: that writers, and perhaps especially women writers, learn to undervalue their own work. In a recent study at Stanford, an assistant professor of organizational behavior conducted an experiment in which he asked a group of male and female students to write an essay, and then asked the students how much they thought they should be compensated for such an essay. The women paid themselves 18 percent less.
A few years ago, an editor at a beauty magazine picked up my debut novel from her slush pile and e-mailed my publicist to ask if I’d write a personal essay for her.
“What could I possibly write on beauty—I don’t even wash my face twice a day,” I complained to my boyfriend.
“Why don’t you write about how you think your ears stick out too much?”
What a hilariously inappropriate idea! I’d never even written a pitch before, so my publicist helped me, and I sent it off gleefully, anticipating a rejection that would absolve me from having to actually complete the assignment. Professional writers wrote for magazines; one of the characters in my novel was a talking baby panda.
“My boss loves this,” the editor responded, and offered me three dollars a word to complete the essay.
I received the e-mail just minutes before meeting my best friend, a poet, for a drink and when I blurted out the rate, she cried (she was already having a bad day). But she was right, wasn’t she? I didn’t deserve this.
There’s a psychological model called the four stages of competence. Stage one: unconscious incompetence, like writing poems effortlessly at thirteen because you read one book by Sylvia Plath and have no idea that there are any other books in the world. Stage two: conscious incompetence, that feeling of whoa when you’re learning to actually write and becoming aware of exactly how many other books there are in the world. Stage three: conscious competence, or the boldness to answer, “I’m a writer,” when anyone at a party asks, “So what do you do, exactly?” The final stage is unconscious competence, or the ability to easily perform a skill, without thinking as you’re doing it, perhaps even at the same time you’re working on another task.
Stage three is where I’d like to be, but imposter syndrome sends me back to stage two. Stage two doesn’t want to see my clips or accolades. Stage two says I’m overrated and overpaid. For some strange reason, the ego I’ve built up around my writing crumbles when someone solicits my work and offers to pay me for it. When I’m submitting a poem or toiling away on a chapter, I feel like an underappreciated genius, and rejection only inspires me to keep going. Won’t they be sorry someday, and so on. But with a solicitation comes the risk that I’ll disappoint the editor (or the artist), or turn in something truly embarrassing. That I will be found out, discovered as a fraud.
In August, on the morning after I drafted that e-mail to the artist, I deleted the words my imposter self had written the night before and started again. It took two hours and too much coffee, but I drafted a couple of paragraphs on how her newest work was “a bold and original synthesis of major modernist (and male) influence with a printing technique that’s organic, bodily, feminine.” Then I sent it to her.
She didn’t respond for days. The insidious voice of the imposter returned, admonishing me for not giving up when I still had the chance. Then, finally, came the reply:
Hi Leigh,
Sorry to take a while to reply.
Everything you’ve written here is so interesting and impressive—you’re so informed and knowledgeable about art…. I’m not sure why I didn’t expect you to know so much about art, but it now seems so natural to me that you would. Your writing is too good, too worldly for you not to.
I read her words about a thousand times, until the conviction of her validation drowned out my self-sabotaging inner monologue, and I could complete the essay.
Later, when I told this story to Sherry Amatenstein, who is both a licensed clinical social worker and an author, she told me that yes, the high we get from positive feedback can work for a while, but eventually, when we turn to face the next page, or the next project, the internal broken record of insecure and doubtful thoughts will begin to play again.
“We look to others to define who we are,” Amatenstein says. “It’s reactive. We put others ahead of ourselves: ‘Well, if I can do it, anybody can. Look at what so-and-so did.’”
Does this affect writers any more than other people?
Absolutely, Amatenstein says. “The whole process of writing is so fraught because unfortunately it is so much about what other people think.” For writers, professional value is so tied up in publication: If no one wants to publish that novel or poem you thought was so good when you wrote it, of course you feel stricken. “Artists are always waiting for the next rejection, or the next person to like them.”
So what can we do?
“I really think you almost have to yell at yourself: ‘Stop! Why am I doing this? Why am I writing?’ It’s an inside job,” Amatenstein says. “Once you can stop being an imposter to yourself, you won’t feel anymore that you’re an imposter to the world.”
At the end of 2015, I received another solicitation. For four years, I’d been writing poetry using dialogue from the reality TV show The Bachelor (stage four: the ability to perform a skill at the same time you’re working on another task), and an editor asked if I would write a poem for the twentieth anniversary of the franchise. I said yes without hesitation, and wrote the poem in forty-eight hours. On the scale of pay rates for poets, I was compensated handsomely.
It’s easy to make fun of the idea of a “professional poet,” two words that go together like “peanut butter and cauliflower sandwich.” Even if that’s what I was, I still wondered why it had been so much easier for me to write this assignment, compared to the essay the summer before. I wondered whether I would ever be able to apply the confidence I have in my “stage four” skill as a poet to other genres. Maybe I just wasn’t as good a prose writer, and my assignments so far had just been a bit of luck? But then I realized I was asking myself the wrong questions. The more important question is this: What if I stopped viewing my career as a series of happy accidents, and admitted I have the skill and experience to garner assignments? That I can write poetry, and essays, and novels, and get paid for that work—because I’m good at it?
This year I have a new mantra. Above my desk is a quote from a nine-year-old Margaret Thatcher, upon receiving a prize at school: “I wasn’t lucky. I deserved it.”
Leigh Stein is the author of the novel The Fallback Plan and a collection of poems, Dispatch From the Future, both published by Melville House in 2012. Her memoir, Land of Enchantment, is forthcoming in August from Plume. She codirects the literary nonprofit organization Out of the Binders and lives outside New York City.
