Are we all imposters?

Everybody here has imposter syndrome. The people who don’t probably have a personality disorder. – One of my attendings

Wellness is a hot, honestly, over-talked about topic these days, and medical school is no stranger to trends. But wellness exercises in medical school have only made me more aware of my imposter syndrome that I’ve felt since day one.

And what I’ve recently learned is that medicine is filled with so-called imposters. Maybe we’re all imposters. After all, part of adulthood is learning that adults actually have no idea what they’re doing most of the time. The mirage of put-together grown-ups we had when we were kids just shatters one day. I’m discovering the same in medicine — the perfect genius doctors I visited and shadowed and learned from actually have doubts every day. But no one wants to see a doctor who doesn’t believe in herself.

I thought I’d be over my imposter syndrome by now, but I’m not. As becoming a doctor gets more and more real, I’m waiting for someone to find out that they made a mistake and shouldn’t have let me get this far. My attending kindly reminded me that I might be waiting forever, and that feeling may never go away. It probably won’t. But it gets quieter, and it becomes nuisance rather than a debilitating fear. And honestly, that feels far more achievable than these articles claiming to help you overcome imposter syndrome. If I were to never have imposter syndrome again, I would probably still feel like an imposter, pretending that I didn’t have imposter syndrome. Knowing that it will be something I learn to live with rather than fight against with all my might is…real. It breaks through the black/white perfectionist tendencies that imposters have. Maybe I’m an imposter, but maybe I’m not. Maybe I’ll never know, and maybe that’s ok.

At the very least, I have this disastrous blog to remind me that there are definitely things where I’m not a fraud, I’m actually just this bad at being successful in writing.