Is It Really Imposter Syndrome?
How showing up in the workplace as your authentic self can make you feel undeserving.
I wanted to write a more personal post because the last thirteen months have truly shifted the way I navigate womanhood. For a long time, I had this idea of what a woman, mother, and wife should be. I thought in society today black women were expected to be successful because of the availability of knowledge and resources, that it simply wasn't optional to not be at a certain place in your career come age 35.
Combining that with COVID and the surge in career pivots, I felt that I too should focus more on what made me feel purposeful and passionate. I have worked in corporate healthcare for almost a decade, and while it was what paid the bills, I wasn’t passionate about health administration. I’ve always wanted to be an entertainment journalist and considered being a freelance writer again. My current lease was going to be up soon and I decided that after my move, I was gonna focus on making MYSELF happy.
I opted in to work as a Virtual Assistant, solely to free up some of my time, and because this option allowed me to continue to work remotely. My first few clients were healthcare-based, so the transition was easy. Very quickly I realized though that I didn’t want healthcare clients. I began to envision what my ideal client would look like and narrowed down the services I offered. I landed a huge tech client and the imposter syndrome began to set in thick.
Imposter syndrome is loosely defined as doubting your abilities and feeling like a fraud. It disproportionately affects high-achieving people, who find it difficult to accept their accomplishments. Many question whether they’re deserving of accolades.
There were students who were learning coding languages, interning, volunteering, and entering contests to be a part of an organization like the client I had. I sat in and took meeting notes; gaining access to information that most people looking for senior positions would have loved to have the insight on. I felt so out of place and completely out of my comfort zone. I sat in meetings with my camera off, I only communicated via slack/email, I completed tasks on Trello at the speed of light out of fear of losing this client or being seen as a slacker. In the interim, I started my own publication but completely put it on the back burner to keep up the character of ASSISTANT OF THE YEAR. I even dropped my other clients to focus more on this tech company.
How did I get here? Did I not deserve to have the client I literally manifested? I took a beat to assess my past accomplishments in a self-affirmation attempt. I had gone to Berkeley, I had worked at a University Hospital, I've held senior coordinator positions, I had started my second business- and continued to go down the list like that. Professionally, my work experiences made me feel small and unheard, and even though I didn’t feel any of that from my tech client, I was suffering PTSD from microaggressions in previous workplaces.
Remarks about my hair, sexuality, nationality, and other identity-related categories made me feel that I was always under a microscope. Naturally being a light-spirited and funny person, I would work earlier shifts to leave work earlier than the rest of my colleagues, I would work with headphones on, I would private all of my social media accounts, and just shrunk completely. I remembered feeling that the companies that I applied to solely because they advertised “diversity”, weren't actually implementing diversity in the workplace. Being the only bisexual woman, the only woman with an island accent, my coworkers made “jokes” disguised as compliments, and my complaints about them seemed minuscule to leadership.
So here I was, waiting to experience this from a company who had a team that always praised me, made me feel valued, offered paid training (learning a coding language, applications, etc), and genuinely wanted me working for them to act as a two-way street. The company intended for my experience with them to benefit me more than in a way of a paycheck. There were more people in this space that identified with LGBTQIA+ and persons of color. Like Jodi- Ann Bury mentioned in her TedxTalk, it’s much easier to be who you are when who you are is all around you.
It’s not my job to make the space diversified and inviting. That’s the job of the leaders and the owners. I wasn’t experiencing imposter syndrome before, I was experiencing prejudices and racism. It’s easier to spot that now, only because I work in a totally different environment. Powerful women like Michelle Obama even admitted to feeling imposter syndrome at points in her career- the link to racism in her experience is uncanny.
Leaders must create a culture for women and people of color that addresses systemic bias and racism. Only by doing so can we reduce the experiences that culminate in so-called imposter syndrome among employees from marginalized communities — or at the very least, help those employees channel healthy self-doubt into positive motivation, which is best fostered within a supportive work culture.
Perhaps then we can stop misdiagnosing women with “imposter syndrome” once and for all.
