impostor syndrome
When people mention their impostor syndrome, I sometimes think, “I can’t offer advice, because if I were you, I’d feel like an impostor too.”
And yeah, I sometimes feel like an impostor, even though some great people insist I’m the real thing.
I started to wonder: Who isn’t an impostor? Merit is everywhere, but so is luck. Almost no successful person can honestly say they inherited nothing that worked in their favor. Who is definitely not a phony?
That’s the question I set out to answer by writing this poem.
The answer I found was that you aren’t an impostor if you take a real risk in a time of need—a time when everyone else is trying to be risk averse, when safety is precious.
If you look at the upside and downside, and you see that there’s a real chance that you could fall very far, and you take a chance anyway—and if you do that because you believe deeply in what you do—then you are the real deal, whether or not you succeed.
What will you take a chance for in 2024?
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Ellen Fishbein ~ ALTAMIRA.STUDIO
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