I willed myself to freeze, releasing my bow from the string so that it hovered in midair, as the final D minor arpeggio rang, and finally died. I’d done that on purpose; frozen, because I wanted to remember that moment for the rest of my life. Call me whatever you’d like– smug, overdramatic, vain– but I wanted to relish the feeling of chords beneath my fingers, of the performance adrenaline as it faded into triumph. I slowly lowered my hands from the cello. Inhaled. Wiped a sweaty palm on the skirt of my dress. And time resumed.
On the drive home, I would learn from my parents that I was to be recommended for the highest financial aid award that could be given to a music student. But whatever magical high I’d experienced vanished as I heard this. Now, I felt like shit.
I’d owned that audition; and I don’t say that to be vain, or cocky, or whatever, because no one reads my blogs, so there’s no point in bragging here. Seriously though, that had been one of the few times I’d felt good about myself after a performance. Irregardless, the accomplishment felt empty, as if I’d somehow conned this professor into thinking I was a protege, or that I’d gotten lucky because the cello-playing gods had smiled down upon me for the three minutes it took to play the audition materials. Rather than celebrate, I spent most of the hour-long car ride back to my house in sullen silence.
I began to notice a similar pattern that week in school; I found that I received an A on a Calculus quiz, but chalked it up to good luck, or because the content wasn’t really that difficult to understand. I was given a solo in one of my out-of-school ensembles, and figured that my cello teacher felt bad for not giving me one yet this year. Eventually, I figured that enough was enough! I was going to get to the bottom of this, and proceeded to make a few Google searches (because there’s obviously nothing better than self-diagnosis, right?). This blogpost is the result of my findings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQUxL4Jm1Lo
Imposter’s syndrome. For those of you who don’t feel like/don’t have time to watch the video, allow me to explain. According to Psychology Today, “The imposter syndrome is a psychological term referring to a pattern of behavior where people doubt their accomplishments and have a persistent, often internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. [These people], despite having adequate external evidence of accomplishments, people with imposter syndrome remained convinced that they don’t deserve the success they have” (Dalla-Camina). Initially, I was surprised that a term already existed to describe how I was feeling; as ridiculous as this sounds, I was glad that I wasn’t the only person to experience this. The more I thought about it though, the more it began to make sense. For eight hours a day, five days a week, I’m in a highly stressful atmosphere: school. It’s easy to become self-centered in this setting, worrying about upcoming tests, quizzes, and projects, and even easier to feel as though you’re the only one struggling to keep up with the workload (this goes more into Duck Syndrome, which I’ll probably take more time to discuss in part two of this blogpost). We, as teens, also want to believe in something. So we delude ourselves into believing that our peers are as flawless as their Instagram feeds, and that in comparison, our own lives are complete trainwrecks. Great, I identified a problem and found the root of the issue, but how do I solve it?
My next Google search was a little bit more complicated. How do you overcome imposter’s syndrome? .54 seconds later, a handy article entitled “10 Steps You Can Use to Overcome Imposter’s Syndrome” popped up as the top hit (linked below). While I won’t summarize the entire article, the main point was that, in order to overcome imposter’s syndrome, one needs to stop thinking like an imposter. It almost seems too easy. I mean, duh, of course I don’t want to feel the way I do! Really though, can a change in mentality actually make that much of a difference? Well, I’m going to find out. Starting tomorrow, Saturday, January 25th, I’m going to begin a little experiment. Every night before bed, I’m going to write down three things I’ve accomplished that day, and what I believe allowed me to accomplish these things. On this list, I will not be allowed to write, “I accomplished X because I’m a lucky guesser when it comes to taking multiple-choice tests.” The second part of this post will be how successful I think this experiment was, and if I believe it helped me overcome Imposter’s Syndrome.
https://impostorsyndrome.com/10-steps-overcome-impostor/