In the year 2026, about 25 years after I first studied journalism, about 15 years after I got my masters degree from a world-renowned creative writing programme, about the same number of years since I set up the first one-day writing retreat and started the process of Writers’ HQ coming into existence which allows me to write stuff I enjoy every day and feed my family and supports a billion other people to write the stuff they love too, I sit here thinking that actually what I really need is to go back to the beginning, get an undergrad in English literature, another masters degree, then a PhD and then maybe I will be A Writer. Until then, I should take myself off to the Idiot’s Room where I belong.
This is imposter syndrome.
It is, in the parlance of all the best scientific literature on the subject, a fucking asshole.
We’ve all been there, noodling along quite happily with your writing and then BAM, all of a sudden you hear that whining, needling bastard of a voice: “Oooh look at you ‘writing’! L-o-l, what do you think you’re doing? You know it’s all shit, right? Everyone will laugh at you if you think you can publish that. Why are you even trying?”
And then what happens? You stop. You give up. You do something else and struggle to come back to it.
Of course we all want to know what to do about imposter syndrome and how to yeet it into the sun, but perhaps the bigger question is: why do we feel like this?
Shame, guys. The answer is shame. We have quietly donned the heavy robes of SHAME. We exist in a world that loves to tell people they aren’t good enough, that especially loves to tell women and minorities that they aren’t good enough, and even though you have all the evidence to say that you definitely are good enough, that perhaps you’re even an expert, you still somehow feel shame anyway.
And here is the real problem: shame is the opposite of art.
If you exist inside your shame, it will eat you alive and you will be obstructed from producing work that is real and true, and the darkness inside of you will make you feel so small (I see your truee colllourrrs etc and so on).
I can hear you mewling out there ‘but but I’m just a poor human sitting at my Macbook Air without a penny to my name and ne’ery a publishing credit except that one time I got a story on Paragraph Planet but that’s only 75 words so probably doesn’t count and also that story I had published in a lit mag that one time but also I’ll find a reason that one doesn’t count because SHAME SHAME SHAME’
Look. The truth is. THE TRUTH IS. If you sit down and put words on a page you are writing. You are engaged in the act of doing writing. You are, therefore, by the very definition of the word, a writer. A person engaged in the act of writing. What more do you need to be able to say you are a writer? How many stories finished? How many published? At what point will your arbitrary definition of ‘writer’ suddenly kick in? When will you deem yourself good enough to carry on?
All of which is to say: tell your fucking stories. Write your words. Put them on the page, even if you never look at them again. It doesn’t matter, as long as you do it. As long as you know that you have an absolute inalienable right to do it.
Stories are at the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, filed under creativity. Stories are a human right. They are your birthright, your route to self-actualisation.
When we feel inadequate in our writing, when we say we have a syndrome, we are suggesting that there is something wrong with us. If there is something wrong with us we must fix it and to fix it we have to change and oh dear what a shame. SHAME.
In reality, that feeling of inadequacy is entirely external. It’s fed to us from the messages we are sent from the world around us, that we have to constantly hustle and grind, that only specific kinds of success are considered worthy, that we should be in a constant emotional state of deficit and scarcity.
None of this belongs inside us. It belongs out there in all the bluster and bullshit. It’s not imposter syndrome. It’s imposter socialisation.
Want to be radical? Believe in yourself. Call yourself a writer and believe it. Stop comparing yourself to other people. Remind yourself that everything you write will be shit until it’s not and your whole entire job is to keep going until the un-shit-ening and there is no timeline for that. It could be weeks, it could be months, it could be years. And if you are an imposter, so what? Fake it till you make it, baby.
The end go write love you bye.
(PS None of this applies to me of course, I shall continue to feel completely inadequate at all times.)