According to Sedgwick, it was just this kind of interchange that fueled her emotional re-education. She came to see that the quickness of her mind was actually holding back her progress, because she expected emotional change to be as easy to master as a new theory: “It’s hard to recognize that your whole being, your soul doesn’t move at the speed of your cognition,” she told me. “That it could take you a year to really know something that you intellectually believe in a second.” She learned “how not to feel ashamed of the amount of time things take, or the recalcitrance of emotional or personal change.”
— Maria Russo, “The reeducation of a queer theorist”, 1999
My colleague Ioanna Dimitriou told me “worry dies last”, and it made me remember this passage from an interview with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
It’s especially common in fields where people’s work is constantly under review by talented peers, such as academia or Open Source Software, or taking on a new job.
— Geek Feminism Wiki, “Impostor Syndrome”
At the end of 2012/beginning of 2013 I wrote a four-part blog post about my experiences with impostor syndrome. That led to me getting invited to speak on episode 113 of the “Ruby Rogues” podcast, which was dedicated to impostor syndrome. (Unfortunately, from what I can tell, their web site is gone.)
Since then, my thinking about impostor syndrome has changed.
“Impostor syndrome” is an entirely rational behavior for folks who do get called impostors (ie. many underrepresented people). It’s part coping mechanism, part just listening to the feedback you’re getting….
We call it “impostor syndrome”, but we’re not sick. The real sickness is an industry that calls itself a meritocracy but over and over and over fails to actually reward merit.
This is fixable. It will take doing the work of rooting out bias in all its forms, at all levels – and critically, in who gets chosen to level up. So let’s get to work.
— Leigh Honeywell, “Impostor Syndrome”, 2016
I agree with everything Leigh wrote here. Impostor syndrome, like any response to past or ongoing trauma, is not a pathology. It’s a reasonable adaptation to an environment that places stresses on your mind and body that exhaust your resources for coping with those demands. I wrote a broader post about this point in 2016, called “Stop Moralizing About Personality Traits”.
Acceptance is the first step towards change. By now, I’ve spent over a decade consciously reckoning with the repercussions of growing up and into young adulthood without emotional support, both on the micro-level (family and intimate relationships) and the macro-level (being a perennial outsider with no home on either side of a variety of social borders: for example, those of gender, sexuality, disability, culture, and nationality). When i started my current job last year, I wasn’t over it. That made it unnecessarily hard to get started and put up a wall between me and any number of people who might have offered help if they’d only known what I was going through. I’m still not over it.
To recognize, and name as a problem, the extent to which my personality has been shaped by unfair social circumstances: that was one step. Contrary to my acculturation as an engineer, the next step is not “fix the problem”. In fact, there is no patch you can simply apply to your own inner operating system, because all of your conscious thoughts run in user space. Maybe you can attach a debugger to your own kernel, but some changes can’t be made to a running program without a cold reboot. I don’t recommend trying that at home.
Learning to identify impostor syndrome (or, as you might call it, “dysfunctional environment syndrome”; or, generalizing, “complex trauma” or “structural violence”) is one step, but a bug report isn’t the same thing as a passing regression test. As with free software, improvement has to come a little bit at a time, from many different contributors; there are few successful projects with a single maintainer.
I am ashamed of the amount of time things take, of looking like a senior professional on the outside as long as my peers don’t know (or aren’t thinking about) how I’ve never had a single job in tech for more than two years, about what it was like for me to move from job to job never picking enough momentum to accomplish anything that felt real to me. I wonder whether they think I’ve got it all figured out, which I don’t, but it often feels easier to just let people think that and suffer in silence. Learning to live with trauma requires trusting relationships; you can’t do it on your own. But the trauma itself makes it difficult to impossible to trust and to enter into genuine relationships.
I am not exaggerating when I say that my career has been traumatic for me; it has both echoed much older traumas and created entirely new ones. That’s a big part of why I had to share how I felt about finally meeting more of my co-workers in person. I’m 41 years old and I feel like I should be better at this by now. I’m not. But I’ll keep trying, if it takes a lifetime.