Impostor syndrome and grief

Roman theatre mask from a mural

“That night, that year of now done darkness…” - Gerard Manly Hopkins

I’ve spent most of the last 12 months feeling like a moron: struggling to concentrate, to learn or take in new information, to make good judgement calls, to trust my memory.

My “year of now done darkness” contained the suicide attempts of two people I know, one of which was a family member and which was shortly followed by the news of my mother’s diagnosis with cancer, and that was followed - with shocking quickness - by my mother’s actual death.

The rest of the year was bullshit: the worst kind of workplace politics lead to me being the target of bullying, which kicked in not three weeks after poor mum’s funeral. Various other snafus and stoushes bookended all of the above. None of these smaller dramas were as hard hitting as the bullying, or the near or actual death of people I cared about, but all served as a further drain on my resilience.

In amongst all of this I started a new contract. News of one of the suicide attempts came just two days before my induction. I went in pretending I was in Happy Camper mode but, in reality, I was in a flat spin.

Every time I went in to deliver training, I thanked God for my earlier experience as a performer: the show went on but, behind my professional exterior, I was a wreck. It was a year of sadness and anger, of insomnia, of disproportionate physical fatigue, of disorientation, of not being able to retain information and having to rely on cheat sheets and palm notes (which I couldn’t read anyway because the words swam in front of my exhausted eyes). But somehow I scammed and improvised my way through.

I had to pretend to be cheerful in front of people although, God knows, I tried to avoid as many of them as I could. I acted as if I were calm and sociable and competent when, in actual fact, I knew myself to be a misanthropic cretin who couldn’t think my way to the end of a sentence. I was manky in intellect and spirit. And this was valid. How else could I have felt after being exposed to other people’s malice, or despair, or death?

But I lived in a world that needed me to be otherwise. And, if I wanted to leave my home to earn money to pay rent and buy food, which I vaguely understood that I needed to do, then I had to go out into that world and pretend that I was what it designated as ‘OK’. Whatever that means.

On with the motley. The show went on.

But this meant that I didn’t actually behave authentically unless I was at home all by myself, in which case it was OK to stare blankly at a wall, forget to eat, or cry into a pillow. Which meant that I felt like I was faking it every time I walked out the door. And that was actually what I was doing. Which meant that I was an impostor, a dishonest representation of another person - a happy, organised, palatable person.

Articles abound earnestly counselling us all to defeat our impostor syndrome - that furtive but insistently treacherous voice living in our heads that tells us that we aren’t really as good as others think we are, that our incompetence will be exposed any minute.

But when you are in grief, this voice is not treacherous as much as realistic. For most of last year, underneath my bonhomous and tidy exterior I was living as a crazed mess. How I functioned I don’t know.

Living with grief means living with many and varying moods, thoughts, and energies. It’s all a part of the necessary adjustment process that grieving affords. But because our society demands that we behave in ways that run counter to this adjustment process, being in grief also means that you live as an impostor, divided from the core of your authentic grieving self.