Fear of Being Found Wanting

Recently, I visited with a bright young woman who is in graduate school and working as a substitute at our school who wondered if she were really capable of teaching.  That same day, I’d heard a successful published author voice a similar worry about her writing.  My own daughter worried about a major she wanted to try, because she hadn’t tried it or done it up to now.  They all allowed their worries to melt their joys.

Imposter syndrome is a reality born not of not being qualified, or not being successful, or not being experienced, but of worry that one will be exposed to be less than.  The reality is, we can always become deeper thinkers, better teachers, stronger writers or discover a new field that holds in it an inexhastible ocean of wonder for our soul. It’s that we worry if we didn’t find it sooner, or already have a working knowledge, somehow the future of pursuing it, will be shut to us.

We  are treating discernment about school and career paths as locked in permanent realities that must be perfected before we’ve taken the first step.  Alternatively, if we’ve managed along, it’s only been because of luck or some such rot.

These are capable, talented, exceptional women —each of them.  All of them are so much more than their career or their accomplishments or their gifts, though the list for each of them is extensive.  They only see the flaws, despite history of success, despite present status, despite knowing their own gifts.  Imposter syndrome is rampant in our time.

1. the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.

Like all lies, the missperception this age suffers from, contains a half truth.

We are imposters in all things, even the things we are experts at, because all of us are limited in our capacity, if not by knowledge, then by time, as we will eventually faulter, forget, or not know.  Our expertise and talents will all be superceded by someone at some point. Being superior is not the goal –daring to do, and to love, to witness and to pour out our lives for others with each drop of time, that is the calling of every soul.   The how of it is left to our imaginations to discern and develop, that we might better reveal to the world God’s gift of His love through our efforts in all things.

When a society only values us for what we do, everything becomes what have you done lately, and it is never enough.  Even in the womb, we are more than our DNA, more than our development, and more than our potential.  We are, and that reality is actually sufficient.

Likewise, if we are ony on this earth to be useful, then any time not spent being productive becomes a waste, and the moment we can no longer produce, we likewise become a waste of space.  The woman in the nursing home who cannot speak, who lays in bed but sits up for when her son comes to visit, or hums along with the tune played on the out of tune piano in the other room, has infinite worth in God’s eyes as the Marine Core Marathon training mother of five.   Every student who enters the classroom is more than their grades, their behavior, and their coursework.  Every athlete is more than their stats.

It doesn’t seem like this should be breaking news to anyone, and yet given what I heard in the course of a single day, it seems the world does not believe this great reality.

We are in Advent, we are preparing for Christmas, for the ultimate Gift God offers –Himself to us.   We should recognize, we are ourselves, gifts to the world, created by God for the purpose of revealing God’s love to the world through our acts, through our words, through our gifts, even as we go through the process of discovering and developing them.  What’s more, we are gifts in and of ourselves by being.  We’ve been given by God to the world to love and to be loved, not for what we have or haven’t done, said or haven’t spoken, but for being. We are to be God’s gifts to the world.   So while God will weigh and measure us by how much we love when it comes to the end of our time here, all the time here, we are a gift given, imagined before we were ever conceived, into being by an Infinite all loving all knowing God.

Let us go and bring our gifts to the stable, and bow before the one who will love us despite all the ways in which we are not yet what we are called to be.