An imposter, to impose.

By Jacob Mills

He’s getting tired and weak now. The stones and arrows clutter the ground around him. There are too many. But this proud old warrior burns with the need to stand, sword raised, shield strong. He will keep charging, stubborn, eyes-closed and unforgiving. And unaware. Unaware that the stones and arrows won’t kill him but carve him into something new, if only he would open those tired old eyes.

He is Narcissus, he is battle-hard, and he is ego. But he is in the fade.

He fights through fear. Afraid to embrace the randomness with which the stones carve him. Afraid to confront his flaws where the arrows dig in, sharply and with the stinging illusion of pain. He is a warrior because he is afraid to let go. He is afraid of uncertainty. He is afraid of not being good enough for the world outside his walls. So he fiercely defends his castle, where he pretends to be King. Unknowing that choosing to be a peasant beyond the walls will make him rich in ways that he can’t imagine.

~

She adjusts the focus on her microscope, tired and alone. It’s after midnight and she makes another note in her lab book. She’s just collected the last data point that will revolutionise the treatment of malaria and save countless lives. She will be lauded, glorified, and celebrated. But she doesn’t know that yet.

She values science above all else for progress, she has placed it on a pedestal, but she doesn’t see herself upon it. She feels out of place amongst her peers, those that have already tasted success and been well received, and those that she admires as heroes the way some see sports stars. She has internalised the systemic, institutional abuse of being an over-worked and underpaid graduate student, and now that she has her own lab she is viscerally insecure as a lead scientist. And it is a viciously competitive world where failure is buried, and bullies get it all. She tells herself that she’s just one mistake away from a failed career, a failed dream. Her belief in her abilities is failing her, though she perseveres through anxious feelings of inadequacy.

But deep inside her, ego is strong and fighting hard with the dissonance to her reality. Her ego tells her that she must be on that pedestal. But her struggle to be accepted by her peers, to make a breakthrough in a world built on half-truths, only stories of success, is telling her that she’s not going to make it. She wants to be everything to her field, but she can see now that that won’t come easily.

An identity built by ideals internalised from the barrel of toxic norms around her, she is saturated with a singular goal with ideals of perfection. But, she knows she’s not perfect, except, perceives that others are, so she acts that way and the dissonance makes her feel like an imposter. Her self-confidence is collapsing, and, long after her success, feelings of an imposter will remain until she opens her eyes to her deeper truths, and the humbling truth of an imperfect world – an idealogue struggling to fit systemic ideals.

~

He’s fifteen years-old and standing on a grassy amphitheatre. Sex, drugs, and alcohol rock’n’roll around him. He’s overwhelmed. He compares himself to the beautiful people. The care-free. Those caught up in the moment. They are ‘cool’ and he is struggling to figure out who he is above the bosom shelf, amongst the boho and the muscular, the sun-tanned and surf-hardened. He doesn’t feel good enough. The social imagery of perfection is internal.

Popular at school and dominant in the socially important world of junior sports, his ego became carved with chiselled machismo. But now, out in the real-world he is naked and unsure. He’s overwhelmed by the real people that fit the wishful image that he has for himself, and suddenly he realises that he’s not that.

Internalised social expectations, the augmented imagery of perfect, materialistic, aesthetic lives, are his measure. And he’s out in the open, exposed and surrounded. He’s an imposter amongst the plasticene, but he doesn’t know it’s a fake.

Now he’s twenty-nine and slightly mouldy, stagnant. He’s an emotional sleepwalker. His identity has been built on comparisons to others in a world of augmented, projected perfection. He became the world around him, egoic and calcified. Narcissism came as a survival mechanism.

But he’s waking up now. A series of toxic relationships shook him so hard that now his eyes are wide open and he’s in perpetual motion. He began a journey that would ultimately lead him right back to himself. His emotions, needs, desires. He remembered what he’d seen about the goodness in the world and found that he liked who he was at a deeper level. He’d found self-acceptance and with that, he began to sonder. To see that others were living their own complex and flawed lives in a world that expects artifice – imperfect people, perfectly pretending. He found empathy and became kinder.

Coming to self-acceptance and to sondering vanquished the old warrior and vanished the anxious imposter. He could see clearly now that he was just one porcelain shard amongst the stunning mosaic of humanity. He didn’t need to be on a pedestal because he realised that the pedestals and their pain were just an illusion that fostered ego, insecurity, and envy. The realisation that he wasn’t an imposter, that the imposter is the society around him, was profound. Nothing was as important as just being. And letting be.

~

It is neither alive nor dead. It is the biological material of its slaves and only reproduces by manipulating them to enjoy it. It is psychology and marketing, greed, insecurity, envy and ego, identity politics and being holier-than-thou. It is the 9-to-5 and the lack of time. The neighbour’s new car and the bosses’ bigger house. It’s Mark Zuckerberg and the vacant influencers, the Insta-babes. It’s Hollywood and eating disorders. It’s racism and the patriarchy. It’s a proud old warrior.

We’re told it’s the umbrella protecting us from the rain, but it’s a beautiful day. We can open our eyes and challenge our egos to grow into better beings, but what if we started in a healthier place, an environment that wanted the best for us? Society gaslights us, makes us feel inadequate to hide that it is the fraud. Our constructed systems build us as imposters, but what if we turned around and began to impose, to agitate and activate, to throw stones and fire arrows at society, the real imposter?