Afterthoughts #5
More thoughts on impostor syndrome
Welcome to A Narrative of their Own, where I discuss the work of 20th century women writers and their relevance to contemporary culture. You are reading my bonus Afterthoughts letter, where we delve into the themes behind the writing.
This Sunday’s newsletter was a longish piece around the issue of Impostor Syndrome, particularly its relationship to the act of writing.
“The impostor syndrome is a psychological term referring to a pattern of behavior where people doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent, often internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud.” Megan Dalla-Camina, Psychology Today
The idea for the piece came about from my own musings following Substack’s recommendation of my newsletter a couple of weeks ago. This saw a huge growth in subscriber numbers - which was great! - but as I said in my piece on Sunday:
“When you first put something out into the world, there's very little to lose. Nobody is expecting anything. It’s exciting, but there’s very little risk involved. The stakes are pretty low.”
Suddenly having a larger audience - including some new paying subscribers - can also make sharing ideas and writing a bit more daunting.
“You can begin to question who am I to be writing this? And what do I know that people might be interested in?”
As I say in the piece, when I wonder about these sorts of things, I like to look at some of the literary women I admire, to see whether I’m in good company.
It turns out that I am!
The first ones to leap out at me who had struggled with these feelings of impostor syndrome were the wonderful Maya Angelou, and the feminist icon, Simone de Beauvoir. There were also many more contemporary writers who struggled though, such as bestselling novelist Marian Keyes and Candice Carty-Williams.
This led to a look at whether this was simply a female preoccupation. I heard a report on a BBC radio show many years ago which said that women were unlikely to apply for a position where they were almost fully qualified, but lacked in some areas. Men, meanwhile, the report revealed, would apply for a position regardless of lacking a substantial amount of the essential criteria. I can imagine from my own experience of the workforce that this may be the case, and certainly, I know I have talked myself out of opportunities, only to see someone less experienced than myself land the job!
However, another consideration did come up whilst researching the piece (as well as by a reader) suggesting that perhaps just as many men did in fact suffer with this issue, but simply didn’t admit to it so much, perceiving it as a weakness. It would be good to hear from any of my male reader/writers as to what they thought about this!
“When conducting research of women writers, the reasons cited for their lack of publication within the field included: questioning their legitimacy to write the book; the time away from domestic duties and childcare needed to write it (as well as that age-old favourite ‘guilt’); to the fear of upsetting someone, getting things wrong, or just plain failure.”
I think that whilst the fear or failure is common amongst most people to some degree, the guilt and shame associated with imperfection, as well as the idea of leaving one’s children to pursue something that may ‘fail’, is often too great a hurdle to many women. A recent survey has also revealed that whilst most couples claim that they share the responsibilities of domestic chores and childcare, it is still the women of the household who bear the brunt of this, regardless of the number of hours either of them work outside of the home.
One subscriber associated with the idea of ‘perfectionism’, stating that they felt it was a case of society’s ‘gendered conditioning’ and that if we get things ‘perfect’ as women, we cannot then be criticised or our place at the table questioned.
“This is particularly understandable when writing online in the era of social media and cancel culture.”
I think this is relevant also: once we press ‘submit’ on any piece of work on the internet, it is out there for anyone to see, criticise and engage with in any way they see fit. If that piece of writing gets shared on social media, and especially if it contains anything somebody else may find fault or offence with, then we could find ourselves receiving negative comments and even being ‘cancelled’. This is the extreme, of course. But it does happen, and it can be paralysing for some creators to contemplate.
What many readers really engaged with on this piece though were the thoughts and attitude around impostor syndrome expressed by Simone de Beauvoir.
“Beauvoir says she chose to change the way she thought, stating that her curiosity to learn more was greater than her pride.”
This quote spoke to many readers, and in particular I loved the idea of Dr Victoria Waller who writes the brilliant Beyond Bloomsbury. Victoria rightly pointed out that the community here on Substack was a little like Beauvoir’s reference to her place amongst her fellow academics:
“Rather than questioning her right to be amongst such esteemed peers, she embraced the knowledge that she still had much to learn, imagining herself as part of a collective project.”
I loved this idea! How many times have you read a piece of writing on this platform and it has sparked other ideas for your own creative work? I know I have, and I hope that my own writing offers the chance for others to learn and go on to seek out more.
“I preferred learning to showing off.”
Beauvior didn’t want admiration - or care about subscriber numbers, in today’s parlance - she simply wished to get better at what she did. What mattered to her was striving to become a philosopher. This is such a refreshing sentiment; the fact that we can continue to strive to be better. That what we put out there into the world doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to be something we care deeply about, and we must be willing to learn more towards our craft.
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Really enjoyed this follow up and the original. I think that you could be right what there are not as many men who admit to imposter syndrome.
Such a great musing with research here. I feel this a lot! I was just talking about a job with a friend yesterday that I thought was currently out of reach and she said, 'You know a guy would just go for it.' So one way to combat this is by questioning yourself - or allowing your friends to - by saying, 'Would a guy do this?' It's not the only answer but it might help.