Trust me on this: “impostor syndrome” is very real. It is, in fact — and obviously — the source of the benzo bottle in every egghead’s medicine cabinet. And the reason all eggheads feel like frauds is equally obvious: Nothing you do can possibly justify your paycheck.
There are no Dead Poets Society teachers in real life in any case, and even if there were, and even if you were one of them, well … congrats, buddy, you’ve managed to reach one student, one time, out of the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands you taught before reaching tenure, the hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands more who will drift through your classroom, fish-eyed and phone-addled, for the rest of your academic career. One kid, one time, and meanwhile you live a life that 90% of Americans would be ecstatic to have. (As for your “research”, […] please. Unless your book revolutionizes a field — good luck with that — maybe twenty people will read it, and fifteen of them will hate it). You’re a fucking fraud, pal, that’s all there is to it …
Which leaves you with two options, if you want to avoid the kind of crushing cognitive dissonance that turns a guy like Todd into a gutter drunk: You embrace the make-believe, or you quit. Todd quit. Becoming a gutter drunk was a spectacularly gaudy, self-destructive way of quitting, but it was quitting nonetheless. I quit too, as y’all know … but the funny thing was, I didn’t quit drinking until I did. I didn’t go out and get wrecked every night like I used to do with Todd, but I was still a drinker, often quite a heavy one. I just did it in private. It was only when I quit the ivory tower for good that I stopped drinking.
This, I suggest, is the ultimate source of the Poz: The crushing impostor syndrome that all Americans feel, who haven’t built their lives up from scratch. Unless your day-to-day is a struggle, a real one — a “need to choose between buying food and making rent” one — you can’t help but feel, at some level, that you’re a fraud, a sham. You don’t deserve this, because no one deserves this who didn’t earn it, didn’t hew it out of the wilderness himself. And the more “white collar” you are, the stronger your latent impostor syndrome. Is it any surprise that Karen, who has never earned anything in her entire life, is the most pozzed? That “Human Resources” is just the Poz Gestapo?
Severian, “On the Poz”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-11-16.
May 24, 2023
QotD: Impostor Syndrome in academia
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