A three-sentence email at midnight

It was almost midnight, and I was sitting at the small table in my apartment in Amsterdam Noord, writing a reply to an email that I was convinced was going to end my career.

The email was from a senior partner. It was not cruel. Looking at it now, I can see that it was not even especially harsh. It said that a piece of analysis I had led on had missed something, that the miss was the kind of thing a person at my level should not have missed, and that we should talk about how it had happened. That was all. Three or four sentences.

But I had been in the Netherlands long enough by then that I could no longer tell myself the discomfort was the country's fault. The country was no longer strange to me. The directness no longer startled me. I had learned the grammar. And so when the old familiar dread rose in my chest at the sight of that email, I could not blame Amsterdam for it. The dread was not coming from the Netherlands. It was coming from me.

It was not the fear of having made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. It was something underneath the mistake: the conviction, sitting quietly beneath an otherwise reasonable professional life, that I had been mistaken for someone more capable than I was. The loose thread that some senior person would now pull until the whole costume of my competence came apart, revealing the ordinary, out-of-place, Polytechnic-trained boy from Namibia who had somehow ended up in a room he had no business being in.

That is the feeling the books call imposter syndrome. I have come to dislike the term, not because the thing it names is not real, but because it makes it sound like an illness, something you catch. I no longer think of it that way. I think of it as information.

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What I learned

Imposter syndrome is data, not destiny. The feeling that you do not belong in the room is not automatically a lie, and it is not automatically the truth. It is a signal. The person who dismisses it throws away information they could have used. The person who obeys it removes themselves from rooms they could have grown into. The person who interrogates it, who turns the vague dread into a specific list, is the only one who gets stronger.

The method is always the same three moves. Name the gap. Ask for the feedback. Study the people who have what you lack: not their results, but their method.

And remember that the ease you see in others is the last stage of a process they have hidden from you. You are comparing your midnight to their morning.

Adapted from Learning to Belong, Chapter 6, "Imposter syndrome is data". About the book