I’ve been meaning to create a personal/ academic website and blog for a while now. It’s just that I’ve been waiting to have more to show for myself. More experience, more than one publication, more conference presentations… less fear that people will figure out that I have been faking my academic confidence since I was 10 years old. Yes, impostor syndrome has become widely acknowledged in recent years and I find myself reassuring my colleagues and friends who exhibit signs of it that they are worthy of being here. Nevertheless, I’m always secretly convinced that I’m one misstep away from being discovered as the big ol’ fraud that I truly am.
I’ve carried this fear since the day I walked into a fourth-grade classroom in Teddy Roosevelt Elementary School without knowing how to speak English. In the US for less than a month, I was the new student and was introduced to my teacher through hand signals and body language. Since there was no one who could translate for me or explain what I should do, I decided to mimic what everyone else was doing. I started copying the notes from the blackboard despite the fact that I had no clue what they meant. I distinctly remember putting together letters that, to 10-year-old me, did not logically belong together.
Both strangers and people who saw me grow up have expressed surprise at how quickly I learned English and lost my accent. I attribute my quick acclimatization to that ease that only children have in picking up new languages. But credit also belongs to my secret childhood shame of being the weird refugee kid. I wanted to fit in and so I copied the gibberish from the blackboard and from the textbooks until it stopped looking like gibberish. I also pretended to listen to the teacher’s lectures until they started making enough sense to allow me to actually listen and understand. Above all, I never asked questions. I pretended to know what was being said and even as I began understanding English, I never asked for clarification. People always assumed that I understood their references and I never let them think otherwise.
I was faking it and have continued feeling like a fake since then. “Fake it ‘til you make it” is a life motto that I cannot seem to shake. It has definitely been a hindrance in times when I could have just asked for guidance from teachers and professors who were there to help me. But it has also been a survival tactic in times when I felt overwhelmed or unprepared. It got me through teaching high school after undergrad, every job interview I ever had, every presentation I’ve ever given, every time I felt uncomfortable in my own skin. It’s probably how I’m going to work up the courage to hit “publish” on this blog post.
I’m actually not sure if anyone is going to read this but I’m glad I’m doing it. Let’s be honest, I was never going to be fully confident enough that my CV and my voice are worthy of being published. Might as well start here.