Life as an Imposter

Over the past few weeks back at school, while I have been enjoying my time with my friends again, I have really been struggling with the feeling that I don’t deserve to be here. Not in the sense that I don’t deserve to be alive, that is a whole other post in and of itself.. But in the sense that I don’t deserve the right to the education that I am receiving.

There are plenty of people in the world who are deserving of the opportunities that they are given. Amanda Gorman and the Inauguration Day masterpiece that she presented, my friends and achieving their rightful places in grad school, even some of them moving to an area that is better suited to fit their needs. I, however, feel like I have been living as an imposter.

For years I had been told that I am a bright, intelligent, and inspiring young woman, destined to lead a fantastic life and carry out God’s plan for me. Going into college, everyone I knew had high hopes for all that I could and would achieve. But I have done so little with what I have been given and for that, I feel like a cheat and a liar.

When you live your life with people constantly telling you that they have high expectations for all you will achieve, you start to feel like something is wrong with you when you haven’t achieved them. For the past three years of my college life I have been trying to push myself to continue to be the best me that I could. That shit is hard.

Burnout is real. Very, very, VERY real. We don’t talk about it much because we live in a society where that same feeling of being drained and like you aren’t achieving all you could be is seen as ultimate failure because we aren’t pushing ourselves to continue to work.

I used to have straight A’s.. what happened? I began to underperform as a student and because my entire self-esteem rested on my grades, now I have no idea what to do. This is something that I am becoming more and more aware of as my years in college progress. I feel like I am failing because I am not getting all A’s. The truth is, I am doing just fine while getting B’s. This is difficult for me to accept because I feel like I am letting all of my teachers and those that used to look to me as one of the good kids down.

This has ultimately taken a toll on my mental health. I have been pushing myself to the brink of insanity. Calling my mom crying for absolutely no reason, pushing away the people that matter most to me, all because I fear I am letting them down.

Here’s the truth of it all: I deserve the education that I am getting here. A very wise woman once said that “if you say it long enough, it starts to become part of you” (Rita Pierson) and that is something that I am going to hold myself to.

I am deserving of the education I am receiving and all the opportunities that lay ahead of me. I will take pride in my failures because they mean that I am still learning. I will rejoice in my triumphs because they show that I am a hard worker. But most importantly, I won’t let this feeling get the best of me.

In the end there is only one person whose opinions of your life, accomplishments, and failures matter - yours. So keep on keeping on.