Writing Problems: Imposter Syndrome
Woolf, Miłosz, Brock-Broido, Rauschenberg, Freud, Fitzgerald, Milton, Rhys, Rodin, Svevo, Gaines, Potter, Chandler, Hardy, Shelley, Melville, Auden, Eliot Holiday, Chaucer, Shoenberg, Rembrandt
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Feeling inadequate, fraudulent, and self-doubt are the markers of “imposter syndrome.” Even despite evidence of “success,” people who experience these things feel like imposters. Imposter Syndrome was first described by psychologists in 1978 in high achieving women.
People who experience imposter syndrome often had high achieving parents who alternated overpraise with intense criticism. These messages then get internalized leading to the imposter feeling.
Studies have found that Asian-Americans were more likely than African-Americans or Latino-Americans to experience imposter feelings. Researchers also found that impostor feelings more strongly predicted mental health problems than did stress related to one’s minority status.
People who are on the margins—because of race, gender, sexuality—are especially vulnerable to imposter syndrome, but anyone who internalizes feelings of self-doubt, difficulty with success, or fears of being discovered, can suffer from it.
Without attention, talking about it, and working through it, these feelings can adversely affect a person. In poetry, though, the markers of “success” are frequently superficial, momentary, and have nothing to do with poetry.
There is a lot of bile in the institutions of poetry—MFA programs, publishing, residencies, the so-called job market—and because there are no rewards in poetry, people take these things much too seriously. The response is either self-aggrandizement or imposter feelings.
The only solution to this acrimony is to help others. Once you’ve climbed Parnassus, you have to construct a ladder to help others up rather than trying to kill your successor.
The bootstrapping, stick-to-itiveness, Horatio Alger competitiveness in America is a myth. It’s what Janeane Garofalo calls a “foundational myth” the way “Justice for All” and “a pint of Ben & Jerry’s is four servings” are myths. But you don’t need to participate in these myths, and you don’t need to accept that these myths are never to be spoken out loud.
What follows are a selection of quotations from people who found Parnassus, but we have forgotten the real struggles they each had in getting there. I hope these dull, if not erase, feelings of imposter syndrome:
Virginia Woolf’s Diary:
Suppose one woke and found oneself a fraud.
Czesław Miłosz:
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.
Lucie Brock-Broido:
In late August of 1988, my book, A Hunger, was published. I had gone to visit Stanley Kunitz, who was my prophet-teacher, and told him, “That’s it for me, I have nothing more.” And he said, though the well is dry it will replenish itself, and to just let it go for now.
Robert Rauschenberg:
Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else’s aesthetics.
It took eight years to sell the first printing of 600 copies of The Interpretation of Dreams.
F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a heart attack. His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the preceding six months. After Fitzgerald died, Scriber’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.
Paradise Lost sold fewer than 300 copies a year in its first 10 years in print.
Al Alvarez:
Jean Rhys was seventy-six years old before she had a literary success. Her first five books—a collection of short stories and four novels, published between 1927 and 1939—had been praised sporadically for their style, disliked generally for their sordid subject matter, and sold hardly at all.
Rodin’s monument to Victor Hugo was rejected by the group that commissioned it.
Rodin’s monument to Balzac was rejected by the group that commissioned it.
Rodin’s monument to Whistler was rejected by the group that commissioned it.
Italo Svevo had to pay to publish The Confessions of Zeno.
Ernest J. Gaines:
Thirty-five hundred copies of Catherine Carmier were printed. Only about 2,500 were sold. The rest were remaindered.
Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish The Tales of Peter Rabbit.
Raymond Chandler didn’t publish his first novel until he was 50.
Thomas Hardy was almost 60 when he published his first book of poems.
No one published Shelley’s Defense of Poetry until about 20 years after his death.
No one published Herman Melville’s Billy Budd until 35 years after his death.
W.H. Auden’s first book was self-published on Stephen Spender’s hand-operated press.
John Lane, British publisher after T.S. Eliot had written Prufrock:
Mr. Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.
Billie Holiday’s bank balance when she died was 70 cents.
When he was 58, Geoffrey Chaucer was sued for a debt of 14 pounds.
Arnold Shoenberg had to retire with a pension of $38 a month.
When Rembrandt’s possessions were sold in 1656 to settle his bankruptcy he had paintings by Raphael and van Eyck, and 75 Rembrandts, but they did not bring enough to settle the bankruptcy.
Just because imposter syndrome isn’t rational doesn’t mean it isn’t real. American capitalism has managed to twist everyone’s psyche into a sick amalgam of unfulfilled desire and want. Greed and lying are normal. Violence is glorified. Ignorance is praised.
Poetry is one of the few forces that can be free of these impulses. If language is tantamount to thought, then the new visions of language will mean new ways of thinking.
There are no shortcuts in poetry. There are no hacks, cheats, quick solutions, or fast lanes. Everyone is tasked with the same job: fill the blank page with something.
As the self grows forward out of the limitations capitalism puts on us, we can leave the imposter self in a fenced-in, boxed-up area. Poetry can make a future perfect self because it is what remains when the bile boils off.
If there are no rewards in poetry, then it’s not about an arbitrary metric of “success.” It’s about listening to the self speak for itself. Facing back, breath by breath, and line by line, you can write yourself out of yourself, and you can engage with your language for its own sake. There are no imposters. There are only readers and writers.
About Sean Singer
I've been reading Heather Clark's biography of Sylvia Plath, RED COMET, and Plath's rigid sense of self-worth=literary productivity is really scaring me, because I see some of that in myself too. I wish there was a medicine for it.
I'd argue the inclusion of Hardy, as the poetry came after successive novels...