Fooling Them All

How I started the journey to no longer feeling like a fraud in my own body.

Story by Abbi Ross

I didn’t sneak my first cigarette until the Thanksgiving break of my freshman year of college.

I was driving out of Fayetteville on a gray, fall afternoon making my way to the split that would put me on Interstate 40 and toward my small hometown in central Arkansas. I had a light blue lighter with lemons on it and a pack of Marlboro 72 Lights — my mother’s cigarette of choice. I picked them up on my way out of town at a dingy Shell station that always made me feel a little uncomfortable. I got them because they were the only ones I actually knew the name of.

I could look the clerk in the eye and say “one pack of Marlboro 72 Lights” with confidence. I could tell them “the short gold ones” without a second thought. I didn’t want to be like the kids stacked in a trench coat trying to buy a ticket to an R-rated film in some movie. So, I chose the only cigarettes that name I knew by heart and hoped the clerk wouldn’t think I was some silly sorority girl defying her mom. Even though I was. I just wanted to feel like less of an impostor in my own life. I wanted to have a reason to feel like I was messing up or at least to feel not so much like a child.

It made me feel like an adult, not some 18-year-old kid trying cigarettes for the first time and hoping her mom wouldn’t be able to smell them on her when she got home. But like with most things in my life, I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t the “good kid” she had raised. I wanted something she didn’t know about. I wanted to do one thing that was bad for me and that she had no say over.

So I lit my first cigarette somewhere between the beloved Bobby Hopper Tunnel and Rudy, Arkansas. The driver’s side window in my white, 2003 Chevy Cavalier didn’t roll down, so smoke-filled my car and for a moment I felt in control of my own life, as silly as it was. But I smoked the cigarette too quickly and I ended up nauseous and wondering if somehow my mom would be able to tell I was not as great as she thought I was. At that moment I felt like I was fooling her and all the expectations that everyone had been built around me over the years.

My smoking habit never picked up, but that feeling of being an impostor never left.

***

I’ve tried to do everything by the book for as long as I can remember. There’s no room to mess up in my world. I don’t have a safety net waiting to catch me when I fall from grace or when I mess up beyond repair. I’m a first-generation college student and I am on my own in a lot of ways. And for 21 years, I’ve done a good job of not messing up.

I have good grades, a long-term job, a full ride to college and I’m the editor in chief of my college newspaper. Go back a little farther and I looked this good in high school, too. I graduated third in my class, I was student council president and yearbook editor — I was even prom queen. I never dated and I never stayed out too late. I got grounded once in high school.

My entire life has been built on a system of trying to be the best or at least damn close to it. But I’ve not always felt that way. It always seemed to be good to be true or like I just got lucky. I did well on AP Lit tests because I just happened to read the right chapter in a last-minute study session before class. I got student council president because I had gone to the school longer than the other candidate. Most of my accomplishments have always been accompanied by that voice in the back of my head saying, ‘you’re not that great.’ It was not until the summer before my senior year of college that I realized the toll this mentality had taken on me.

The semester before it was what some would consider the best of my life, or at least my college career. I was named editor-in-chief of my university’s school newspaper. I got a great internship at a regional paper. I earned my first 4.0 GPA in college. I even had a great new hair color courtesy of some woman with a shop down some dirt road in DeWitt.

But I was not happy. I didn’t feel like I deserved any of it.

I felt like I had somehow tricked all of these people into thinking that I was good enough to do these things. I was not really that smart or that talented or whatever they thought I was. I was lucky. I was in the right place at the right time. I was the safer option.

Along with these accomplishments came genuine compliments and words of encouragement from people that I think the world of. I didn’t feel like I deserved them though and it haunted me to think of the day that all of these people who were so proud would see through the facade I had created and would realize that I was faking it.

That was in the spring. It was not until the end of August that I heard a phrase that changed me: impostor syndrome. A quick Google search and for the first time in months, I didn’t feel crazy. For the first time in months, I didn’t feel like some self-sabotaging girl who was just good at finding reason’s to be unhappy. So, I started doing some research on the words that had given me so much relief and I started realizing this wasn’t a new feeling. It was something I had carried with me for a long time, it just wasn’t until recent months that I realized how heavy it was sitting on my chest.

A phenomenon first addressed in the 1970s by psychologists Suzanne Imes and Pauline Rose Clance, it is described as “an internal experience of intellectual phoniness which appears to be particularly prevalent and intense among a select sample of high achieving women.” Those women were detailed as believing that they were not actually as smart or accomplished as they appeared and that they had fooled anyone who thought they were.

Research since then has shown that impostor syndrome, or impostor phenomenon, can affect anyone, no matter age, gender, or occupation. It was estimated in 2007 that around 70% of people will feel some type of impostor syndrome in their life. As the phenomenon has become more widely recognized it has come that people from minority backgrounds experience higher rates of it as well.

In their original research, Clance and Imes interviewed 150 highly accomplished women. These women had Ph.D.’s, were ranked professionals in their field, or were considered excellent by peers. On paper, they looked great. That greatness did not translate for them and many felt like frauds.

One woman, the chairperson of her department at Georgia State University was quoted as saying, “Obviously I’m in this position because my abilities have been overestimated.” The feelings she had in the 1970s could not have better fit the way I felt when a professor complimented my skills as a student and journalist if I had written them myself in 2020.

Clance and Imes categorized the women who checked these boxes into two categories: those with older, brighter siblings whose parents deemed them the “less smart, more sensitive one” and those who are “the bright, nothing is out of their reach” child.

I am the second option.

***

I am the third child of four — for my mom at least. I was an accident that came 18 years after her first child and 15 years after her second. I’m the third kid in a broken family that features three different fathers, some generational trauma, and is located in a place where the only thing that matters is appearances.

I’ve always had something to prove.

Or at least, I’ve always felt like I had something to prove. I grew up in the type of town where your last name decided how others treated you and what they thought of you. My last name, “Ross,” didn’t have a lot going for it. I’m not from a long line of hometown darlings that ruled the school or from a family that had any sort of impact in the city. Most people don’t even realize who my parents are and are shocked when they find out. In a lot of ways, the odds were stacked against me, and I knew it. So I did everything in my power to beat those odds.

I’m the daughter of a single mother who had her first child six days after her 16th birthday. I grew up in an old trailer on family land on the skirts of the Delta region in Arkansas.

My mom is a waitress at Waffle House, my father is a farmer on someone else’s farm, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. They are two of the hardest working, most dedicated people I have ever met. They made me who I am. But I’ve always known that I didn’t have a safety net. My parents were not going to be able to pay for my college or make my car payments.

So I pushed myself. I was in almost every club that Hazen High School offered. Yearbook, quiz bowl, student council, FCCLA, FBLA — you name it and I was in it. I pushed and pushed and pushed. And it paid off. I will graduate in the spring with no debt and a degree in a field I love.

I always tell my mom it’s her fault that I think I can do anything, and according to Clance and Imes’ research, it is. The study talks about the families instilling in their daughter the belief that “there is nothing that she cannot do if she wants to, and she can do it with ease.” That encouragement is great until the person at hand starts to fail or attempts something they never have before and they do not immediately succeed. It’s supposed to come easy to them and it’s a feeling I know well. Failure has never been an option for me, it couldn’t be. So when I do fail or don’t live up to an expectation I have set in my head, all of the good things I have done come crumbling down and I can only focus on how I’m not as good as people think I am.

I am the product of a society that equates worth with work.

In her years as a life coach, Dr. Eve Agee has seen impostor syndrome in people who are not a part of the typical, dominant culture that surrounds them, like a being straight white male, she said. Many of these people are in a position where they doubt their accomplishments and feel like a fraud because of the culture we live in, although it can affect anyone, including that dominant culture

“It’s tied to self-worth and the way society makes people’s worth conditional on all these different aspects,” Agee said.

Agee, who also has a background in anthropology, commented on how the U.S. has a culture that ties self-worth to productivity that could stem from being part of a capitalistic society, where there are other cultures that don’t have this tie. The lack of focus on other things that people contribute such as kindness or acceptance gets lost in translation and it makes valuing themselves harder. They are focused on being productive instead of things they actually value, Agee said. People are forced to feel productive.

This culture has also created a society in which not meeting those standards of success and productivity can result in feeling like an outcast.

“What I’ve seen with impostor syndrome is (that it is) a lot of people who are extremely well qualified and they’re doing a really good job at what they’re doing, but because they don’t necessarily fit the model of who society has said that is doing something, they feel like an impostor,” Agee said.

Meaning, that these people don’t fit the stereotypical mold of those working around them. They may not look the same, be the same or have the same background, and these differences make them feel like an outlier and oftentimes a fraud.

People of color and other minority groups are especially vulnerable to this sensation. Journalist and editor Jolie A. Doggett wrote for the Huffington Post in Oct. 2019 about her experiences as a successful Black woman and how impostor syndrome affects her.

“…For us, impostor syndrome isn’t just an imaginary voice in our heads,” Jolie wrote. “We can hear it loud and clear when we receive almost daily messages from society that we truly don’t belong. This feeling of otherness is a common occurrence in the workplace where, too often, we may be the only person of color present.”

Although research is lacking in exactly how impostor syndrome affects people of color, most likely because research still does not represent them accurately — Black and LatinX people account for just 6% of all participants in federally funded clinical trials — there is a clear correlation in how they are related.

For most people, impostor syndrome is because of an inner critic, but there are also external factors,  said Dr. Emee Vida Estacio, a psychologist located in Greece and the author of a book on addressing impostor syndrome. Those pressures can from peers, parents, and society in general and only fuel feelings of incompetence or inadequacy.

Like Doggett wrote about, for people of all color, all of those feelings are intensified. Not only are they trying to prove themselves to voice in their heads, but the world around them.

***

Estacio started studying the phenomenon after realizing that it was something she struggled with as well. Before giving birth to her son, she would spend hours working, trying to perfect what she did. She coped with her feelings of fraud or incompetence by overcompensating. She was afraid that if she was not giving it her all and then some, that results would be awful and people would see her truly. Having her son and no longer having the time to bend over backward to prove herself made Estacio realize that something had to change.

“I wrote the book because I survived it,” Estacio said over a Zoom call. It was after 10 p.m. in Greece and she was thousands of miles away from my fourth-floor apartment in Fayetteville, but her words had a similar effect to finding out what impostor syndrome was for the first time — I felt less alone.

It took Estacio professional help and over a year and her life to deal with the aftermath of becoming burnout out and the subsequent identity crisis she dealt with.

“I’m a psychologist, it’s fascinating, as (one) I should have spotted this,” Estacio said. “But, you know, doctors get sick too. Psychologists get mentally unwell too. We’re not immune to that.”

Hearing that this smart, well-received doctor who was countries away from me understood the thoughts that I thought made me crazy was eye-opening. There are people all over the world, from every background imaginable, that feel the same way.

I don’t feel alone nearly as much as I did last spring these days.

For months I questioned whether or not I was worthy of all the good things happening to me. I felt like I was always moments away from something sweeping the rug away from my feet. That feeling is still there and I still question if I am good enough to be doing what I do. It’s a feeling that I don’t think will ever go away, but it’s one I’m learning to talk back to.

The decision to write this story was one of the hardest I have ever made. I am the type of person to keep most arm’s length and then some. One of my most stubborn traits is my pride, and this story goes against everything that stands for. The idea of bearing the inner working of my brain to my classmates and potential readers was vomit-inducing. I did not want them to think less of me than they did before I started talking.

But I stood in front of my peers and my professor in early January and I laid out the pitch for this story and in turn a lot of the blueprint for who I am as a person, in a recently renovated classroom in Kimpel Hall. It was rainy that day and the early grey morning felt a lot like the battle going on in my head on if this pitch was the one I wanted to read to the entire class. I handed out the copies I had rushed to campus that morning to print and decided to share the one that put me out of my comfort zone and into the light.

Reading that pitch was one of the scariest things I have done in a long time. I raced through it, messing up the parts where I should have paused for emphasis and stumbling over sentences that I wrote myself. I told a room of mostly strangers the secrets that for months — years really — I was not able to admit to myself.

When I finished my breathy ramble about feeling like I did not deserve the last six months of my life, I was shocked to hear the voices of my classmates telling me they feel the same way. They weren’t eerily silent the way my brain told me they would be. They were not laughing or shaking their heads at the girl who just couldn’t be grateful. They saw me and I got to see them in a new light.

A lot has changed since I bought that pack of cigarettes.