Here’s the thing.
I don’t know if Impostor Syndrome will ever go away.
I have good and bad days with IS but one thing I do know is that having mechanisms I can come back to, to help me live with Impostor Syndrome, is probably the best way forward.
I’ve only ever had one experience of Impostor Syndrome being openly acknowledged within a creative space. During a facilitation training session, where a drama therapist ran the day’s session, Impostor Syndrome was brought up and questions arose of how to get rid of it.
What I found really interesting was how the therapist very candidly said, in her opinion, it doesn’t really go away. That you have to acknowledge and try to work with it - there will come a point where you and your impostor can start to work together.
I remember thinking ‘how do you befriend your impostor; how do you even do that?
I asked Kevin on his mechanisms for living with his impostor. He said that he thinks “it’s always good to check in and remember why you started out because the voice who told you to go for it and the impostor voice are the same person.”
I completely agree with Kevin on this approach.
Impostor Syndrome can so easily infiltrate our mind. Taking time to sit down with yourself, acknowledge your thoughts and having that conversation is a great place to start.
Priya spoke of while she doesn’t “really have a coping mechanism for coping with Impostor Syndrome, maybe dealing with that type of anxiety through exercising”, she likes to “use, befriending my impostor, in my acting because I know that in all my work, it’s always quite vulnerable and I find that vulnerability from feeling like an impostor. So why not use it, you know.”
This always reminds me of when you learn about energy in science at school. Energy can never be created or destroyed only transferred. In Priya’s thinking, the same could be applied when we experience Impostor Syndrome. Instead of trying to destroy our impostor, transferring our feelings towards our impostor into a different light might help us in befriending it.
One of the things that fuels my impostor is rejection. Learning to find a balance between brushing off and acknowledging the hurt that can come with rejection is a difficult lesson to learn.
We will face rejection because that’s the nature of our industry. Sometimes, I find, coming to terms with that particular hard truth of ‘it’s not a no, it’s not yet’. When you do get that call, it will mean everything to you and, yes, it will give you that inner validation of ‘I can do this! Impostor take a back seat’.
In moments like receiving rejection, it’s great to remind yourself of your worth, what you bring as a person and artist.
Affirming to yourself, and by extension your impostor, of what you want, I find, helps in bringing self-validation to your artistic worth/being.
For example, I used to say I’m an ‘aspiring’ actor, ‘aspiring’ writer, ‘aspiring’ human. Now, when people ask my job; I say I am an actor, facilitator, writer etc and I say it with chest. Just because you don’t have to have loads of credits yet to prove that you are what your job title says you are, doesn’t devalue it or you.
Just saying the name of your occupation, let’s use an actor as an example here, in the phrase “I am an [Actor]” is, I think, the first step in being that occupation. For me, it helps to learn how to find validation in oneself, believing in yourself, your worth and capabilities.
Kevin also commented on how he “had a director who asked in a lecture ‘How do you know when you become a director’ and we all came up with these bulls**t answers; he said ‘if you can convince the people you’re in the room with that you are a director, then you are a director’.
So, in essence, you just need to convince yourself and your impostor of that first and then everyone else will follow suit.
A few days after I spoke with Priya, she sent me this text.
“Here is one of my favourite passages I come back to when faced with the inevitable frustrations of being a creative. Below is an excerpt from a letter to Agnes De Mille. Agnes had just had the biggest success of her life for her choreography in the musical, Oklahoma, but was frustrated that her earlier work, which she felt was superior, had been overlooked in favour of this. Her contemporary and fellow choreographer Martha Graham responded with this letter”
