Many of us walk through life feeling like an imposter. We pretend to be confident, knowledgeable adults who have a direction and a five year plan, always know what to order in restaurants and are definitely not still wondering what we want to do with our lives. Secretly, some of us suspect that somewhere along the line we may have made a mistake.

 

What’s worse is that most of us who live like this feel some sort of shame about it. As though, by now, we ought to have figured out who we really are and settled on it. We assume that everyone else feels no imposter syndrome because they're not acting. That they live completely honest, take me as you see me lives.

 

I think of such people in the same way I think of the aliens. Maybe they do exist but they live so far away from where I am that I’m very unlikely to receive a message from them, and If I did I probably wouldn’t be able to make head nor tail of it.

 

But I think there is room for kindness here. 

 

You can think of your own personal act as something negative, a mask to cover your inadequacies, something duplicitous and dishonest.  Or you can see it for what it was, the way you survived. The only way you knew to step out into the world and not spend your entire life locked in your bedroom, terrified of it. 

 

Yes, you can think of those masks you wear as a weakness, or you can see them as a sign of the incredible ingenuity and strength you have. Because you did it! You walked out of your front door and went into the wild, frightening world. Sure you were dressed as Batman, and that’s a bit embarrassing now you look back, but you still did it! You did go on that holiday, you did do that job interview, you did sign up for that class. 

 

You are a brave and inventive human. 

 

Perhaps all these older, not quite right versions of ourselves are not something to be torn up and hated. Perhaps they were just steps along our road. A road that we are in fact still walking. Perhaps, we should take them down from time to time and remember just how far we have come. Perhaps we should think of them kindly.

 

Although maybe let’s not try the Batman thing again