The Age of the Imposter

It’s 4AM.

You wake up after contemplating for 15 seconds about the choices you’ve made throughout life and then stumble out of bed only to greet your sleep sunken face in front of the bathroom mirror.

This familiar yet strange face stares back at you.

One you call your own.

You continue your routine with freshening up and wipe your face with a towel and as you finish, your new face is ready.

With this face, bright and eager, you can now greet the day with a brand new lie.

A lie that is hopeful to be a truth someday…but maybe not today.

For today belongs to the age of the imposter.

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At some point, we’ve all had this moment. Maybe for some of us, we are still stuck in this damning rhythm. I, myself, have gone through this and am in the middle of going through it as I write this. In an age of progress, self made success, and the false gospel of ‘self love’, I’ve found myself between striving to be what God wants me to be and being nothing short of a fraud.

This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced this. No, this demon has visited me before. It visited me when I switched career paths a few years ago.

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I remember being one of two workers in my former boss’s troupe of iron workers. I was fresh out of my former role of being a retail sales lead so the environment of a construction site was foreign to me. I was in a different state than the one I grew up in and my work partner became my only friend and confidant.

‘How did I end up here?’

‘This isn’t me’

I don’t even know how to read a tape measure’

All these questions, doubts, and concerns echoed between my work partner and I in our many truck place therapy sessions. What else do you do when you don’t have insurance?

I recall one instance vividly. We were sent to fabricate and install iron reinforcements on a job site and during our lunch break, my work partner broke silence and said:

“Have you ever heard of imposter syndrome?”

He then began to explain what that meant and that he felt this way ever since he left his former vocation in the Army.

He felt like a fraud.

Like everything he was doing was just an act.

A disguise in order to survive.

His words hit me like a semi on the turnpike.

I, too, was just fakin it. In hindsight, I was trying to overcompensate for something that I lacked deep inside and I thought that working big iron would give me what I needed in order to achieve a sense of manhood—to gain the respect of my peers and superiors.

But in reality, I was only pretending.

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I felt another sense of being an imposter during the last few months of my engagement to my beautiful wife. I remember thinking to myself:

‘Is this really happening?’

‘What if I fail at my husbandly duties?’

‘Am I really a provider? What do I even provide?’

‘Am I ready to die?’

And even during the wedding ceremony, when I retrospect, I think to myself:

‘Am I always the man that people saw up there in front of the altar smiling with his wife?’

And as I write this now:

‘Do I act as I write?’

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Finally, this third is a more recent episode and a recurring one at that. To those that know me in church, you know me as the guy who serves the altar, sings in the choir, runs a men’s ministry, helps out with Sunday school, reads on Saturdays, and greets everyone with a smile. You know me as an emerging leader in the community. I’m known, hopefully, as a friend, a brother, and as one of my guys in the brotherhood affectionately calls me ‘ringleader’.

But to tell you the truth, before I leave my house, I, too, put on a new face. My interactions, genuine as they are, are filtered through the eye cutouts of a mask that is worn in order to protect my own ego from being seen or even worse—to cause scandal in my neighbor.

The weight of responsibility just seems to intensify the grip that my mask has on my face.

And of course this beckons me to look upward at the Lord and ask:

‘Why me?’

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It’s easy to dismiss our imposter syndrome when it comes to work. We tell ourselves, ‘I’ll just work harder and pump myself up with enough motivation to convince myself that I’m awesome!’

Most of the time that seems to work.

But our spiritual life differs from that of our 9-5s.

When relating to God, psyching ourselves into believing that we are akin to Muhammad Ali usually sets us up for failure.

The holy prophet Isaiah reminds us,

“But we are all like an unclean thing, And all our righteousnesses are like filthy rags; We all fade as a leaf, And our iniquities, like the wind, Have taken us away.” (Isaiah 64:6)

Our righteousness, our efforts, our routines, our subpar gifts are like filthy rags unto God. So how do end up getting out of the hole of feeling like a fraud?

I’ve found in my own life, that embracing this condition and tightening my grip on this cross helps. In other words, I know I’m an imposter. I am prone to failing as a leader, as a Christian, and as a friend. It’s a symptom of living as a broken human in a broken world. All the gifts bestowed upon me from the Lord, I know, are undeserved.

I can only look up at the heavens and ask God for mercy and forgiveness for my shortcomings.

True, half the time I don’t even do that.

But that shouldn’t stop me from trying again the next moment I can.

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Picture the scene: you are a Jewish tax collector in ancient Jerusalem. You are shunned from your own people for being a sellout and a kiss-ass for the Romans. Everywhere you go, you feel the penetrating glares of your people stinging you with every step you fearfully take in your own hometown.

Then, suddenly, the man they call ‘the Messiah’ calls you from out of the shadows and says ‘follow me’. In other words, ‘commune with me, abide with me, you are mine’.

This is the story of St Matthew the disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ, Himself.

Imagine the imposter syndrome he dealt with. Just imagine how much of a phony he must have felt like. And every day for St Matthew must have been a constant struggle of conscience trying to reconcile his past with who Christ called him to be in the present moment.

It’s the same with us. We Orthodox sing with joy every time we chant the Akathist to the Mother of God:

Rejoice, restoration of fallen Adam

Rejoice, redemption of the tears of Eve

We rejoice in the fact that Christ, born of the Virgin Mary, through his resurrection from the dead has also invited us into that same resurrection from our own spiritual death. We have been raised from our own self fashioned tombs; our own hell so to speak.

With this great joy in mind, we can dare to take the mask off that we make for ourselves and present ourselves honestly before the Lord.

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As I write this, I keep in mind that I’m not the only one who feels this sense of imposter syndrome. But I pray for all of us that God will bless this feeling.

God bless us and have mercy on us screw ups and those who miss the mark.

For hopefully through this feeling, we may we all be saved.

Amen.

-m.