I am a person that believes that imposter syndrome isn’t rare and can be a dangerously complacent way of being. In 2021, I heard a sentiment about imposter syndrome that helped me identify how I feel in its bouts.
Sweet Boys was a post-covid podcast created by Garrett Watts and Andrew Siwicki, where they discussed their funniest moments in friendship and deepest fears in life. I am pretty particular about the podcasts I give my attention to — because there are so many — but I was pretty hooked on this one. It was so unpredictably hilarious and incredibly intuitive for the surface description being the cliche: “two best friends start a podcast.”
When in a deep, heady conversation about things they’d been wanting to do, Andrew said, “I feel like I need to wait until I get a letter in the mail or an email that says ‘hey, you are now able to do this certain thing.’” This struck me so deeply, for reasons unknown to me at first. All I knew is that I resonated with the permission of it all. Why do so many of us crave permission, and who is it from?
The reality is, you will never get permission. There is no “committee of people who are in charge of the world,” as Garrett affirms. Those who want to try a new restaurant in town or start listening to a certain kind of music will never be relieved with that letter of allowance.
It is so easy to not do something because of the lack of accountability in today’s world. No one has to call to cancel plans, you don’t have to order in person to get food or even go grocery shopping. Imposter syndrome, to me, is a mental block similar to agoraphobia. One isn’t necessarily afraid to go outside, but may feel like they have not received the invitation to be caught somewhere. Garrett, in response to Andrew’s feelings, says, “With any degree of success that I’ve had in any respect, I have felt like someone’s going to bust into the room and be like ‘oh, busted, you’re not supposed to do this.’”
It’s comforting that more people, similarly to this podcast, are breaking out of the isolation of imposter syndrome to discuss its isolatory existence. As long as we, as humans, can empathize and expect that others feel imposter syndrome in the activities they may want to start, it will eventually become obsolete on a personal level.