Imposter Syndrome

Apparently it never goes away. From Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson to Seth Godin, the greatest thinkers of our day declare that imposter syndrome is a part of the game. At least for change makers, feeling like a fraud is an indicator that you’re pushing the boundaries past where they’re set.

By all measures of success and meaning, that’s a good thing.

But how can I be comfortable when I don’t feel like myself? That’s easy: I can never be comfortable with who I am, because always changing. I’m a different person than yesterday. I’m still me, but that me is entirely different. New. Fresh. Unknown.

Consider this from the cellular perspective. Every time I take a bite of food, those molecules are broken down and eventually become my physical body. Or they get used as energy or excreted. Let’s take this further: each time I take a shit my physical body is drastically changed. I am made new by physical release.

You can be made new each day, too. It will just be uncomfortable. You won’t feel like yourself. You might even feel like an imposter.

Embrace it. It means you’re changing, and change is good.

Put on the New Self

I heard a reading at mass today from Saint Paul. It read: “Stop lying to one another, since you have taken off the old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed, for knowledge, in the image of its creator.” (Colossians 3:9-10)

This speaks to what it means to be a human being, that is, constantly changing who you are. You aren’t the same person you were last year, let alone last night. Friends and family members often treat us as stagnant beings, thinking we haven’t changed since their last encounter with us.

But think about it biologically. Every time you move your bowels you lose tens of millions of microorganisms from your microbiome that have lived in you for days. The argument could be made that those organisms are a part of you because without them you couldn’t survive—they digest, metabolize, and assimilate your food. You are, quite literally, a different person after your morning dump. And you’ll never be the same again.

Maybe instead of wishing we could hold onto who we were we could better accept and embrace the New Self who is inevitably on the way. The only constant in our world is that everything changes, including you and I. I reckon we would be happier people if we treated others as New.

If we allow ourselves to be renewed with knowledge of what is rather than what we would like to be, that would be a pretty good start.