In my last post I mentioned my fear of public speaking, and lately I’ve been trying to figure out where it comes from. I have performed in plays and musicals, sang in concerts, performed with a concert band playing various different instruments, and have even done stand-up comedy and I’ve been perfectly fine.

Let’s do this properly and define it:

“A psychological condition that is characterized by persistent doubt concerning one’s abilities or accomplishments accompanied by the fear of being exposed as a fraud despite evidence of one’s ongoing success.” ~Merriam-Webster

I don’t want to pretend to be an expert or anything on it. I also don’t claim to be unique at all, imposter syndrome is SUPER common. Especially with women. When I went to the Women+ In Physics Conference, in the very first session someone asked the crowd “How many people here consider themselves a physicist?” And maybe a third of the hands in the room went up. After that session, a friend (who I consider to be a great mentor to me) and I were discussing my answer to that question. Here’s a shortened version of the conversation:

Me: “I’m just a student, so I consider myself a physicist-in-training.”
Her: “Okay, so when would you consider yourself a physicist? Where is that finish line?”
Me: “Maybe when I graduate?”
Her: “But you’ve worked on an experiment for two summers.”
Me: “Oh yeah…”

But I still struggle to look at the successful physicists I’m surrounded by and consider myself one of them. To me, there is still a very large gap between them and me. For the longest time, I thought that gap was simply education, but it’s not. That gap is me, or at least a little voice inside me. Just as an exercise, I took the time to listen to the little voice and make a note of what it said:

“You’re not a real physicist yet.”
“You’re just good at pretending to be a physicist, and soon people are going to realize that it’s not real.”
“You’ve just been lucky, and soon enough that luck is going to run out and you’ll be left with nothing again.”
“Eventually you’re going to hit a wall where you can’t pass your classes anymore because you’re not actually smart enough for this.”
“You’re a fraud.”

Do any of those statements sound familiar to you? Is this anything like the internal commentary you give yourself? I don’t share these thoughts to gain sympathy or seek reassurance from people, I just want to bring them out in the open so that those who can relate feel a little less alone, and those who can’t know what it’s like. Try to imagine that you’re a bomb technician, and while you’re disarming a bomb, there’s someone beside you whispering in your ear that you’re terrible at it and you’re going to blow up the block. Do you think that would make it any easier to disarm the thing? Probably not. So why do we let our inner voices talk to us that way?

And that is exactly what happens every time I get up to speak in front of a crowd about my work. I suppose theatre is easier for me because it’s someone else’s words and actions I’ve been directed to say and do. But when I talk about science, I’m exposing my own work and my own thoughts, exposing my own intelligence (or lack thereof) and my own errors, to a room full of people who know a lot more than I do and have a lot more experience than I do. I spent over thirty years having my brain steeped in the arts, and only about two in the sciences.And there comes that voice: “What right do I have to talk about any of this to them?”

I still haven’t found a way to get over this. But… Maybe there is no “solution,” no way to stop feeling it. The panic around public speaking will probably fade with practice, but the imposter syndrome may always be there. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing, maybe it just means we need remember that the people around us are feeling it, too. That most people actually experience it, probably more often than they’re willing to admit. Feelings can be positive or negative, but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing to experience the negative emotions, they are a fact of life. And the more we accept this and recognize that the people around you are experiencing the same thing, the less isolated we’ll feel and the less shame or guilt or anxiety about having these feelings in the first place we’ll experience.

I still struggle to feel like I belong here. But so does almost everyone in the room. And that is strangely comforting. Just for the self esteem boost, here is a woman that does belong in physics, a woman who is a physicist: