I have been having stress dreams about defending my thesis.
In some, my committee takes a break from their deliberations to congratulate me on being amazing and writing a groundbreaking thesis. In others, I am being questioned by my committee and all I can do is stammer answers and wipe off upper-lip sweat. Both dreams feel true.
I often wonder if other people think the same way that I do about their creative or academic work. I alternate between thinking that I'm brilliant and thinking that I'm a hack. At various times, both of these thoughts also feel true.
When I was doing my undergraduate degree in Victoria, years ago, I was introduced to the concept of the imposter syndrome. First identified by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes in their 1978 paper, "The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: Dynamics and therapeutic intervention," the syndrome describes a trait seen most often, but not exclusively, in high-achieving women, particularly in academia.
One of my professors at the time had suggested I read up on the syndrome after I had broken down in her office during her office hours. I remember that she described it to me as feeling like you were a fraud and not at all smart and feeling like people were going to find out that you were actually stupid. I was confused. I said, "I thought that everyone felt like this."
In my experience, most of my friends all felt this way - that at any minute, someone would drag them out of the lecture hall, announcing to the class that they didn't belong there. We used to joke about feeling like that.
My professor looked at me, a bit sadly, and said, "Men don't feel that way."
It threw me for a loop and I brought the conversation back to my friends and we threw the idea around us for a while. In retrospect, I think that I accepted the notion that women have the imposter syndrome and men don't, too easily. Life is never that black and white and people are never entirely one way or another. I have known both men and women who knew in their core that they were amazing and I have known men and women who could not believe that they had talent or worth regardless of what they have been able to accomplish or create.
As I am heading into what will likely be the most challenging presentation of my academic career, I hope that I can be sufficiently prepared to do myself, my supervisor and my family proud. It will be hard but, I think, worth it, in the end. Getting a diploma or degree is not the height of achievement in a person's life but it does represent a lot of work to get the piece of paper to frame and hang on the wall. It is an important event to cap off a period of study.
My thoughts are with other students who are just starting off at college or university and are still filled with the excitement of starting off in a new adventure and I wish them all well on their academic journey. I will see you all on the other side - hopefully with my dignity still intact.
