Even with a good career and all the “adult milestones” I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing. Anyone else experience this?
Even with a good career and all the “adult milestones” I don’t feel like an actual adult. I feel like I’m pretending to know what I’m doing. Anyone else experience this?
The problem is the way we are told to treat adults as kids.
We go all the way through school repeatedly being told that the adults have the answers, they understand everything that we don’t, they know how to tackle the things that seem to big for us, and, most importantly, they don’t make mistakes.
So now that we’re adults, even though we cognitively know by now that it was all bullshit, it’s hard to turn that training around. We make mistakes, don’t have the answers, and sometimes struggle with parts of the world that we’d expected would make sense by now. We know that the adults before us were no different, but it’s been so long that it’s hard to internalize that we, now, are just like them.
Your imposter syndrome is programmed. It’s not your fault.
I knew it was all bullshit when I learned about Santa. Been down hill ever since.
It’s not quite the same but this line of thinking reminds me of a couple of scenes from How I Met Your Mother. Marshall tells the story of when they were travelling as a family when he was a child and his dad was this beacon of heroics who could magically see through the heavy fog. Later we get the story from his dad’s perspective who tells that he couldn’t see a thing, was terrified out of his wits but just kept on going and hoped for the best while keeping a brave face for his family. I know it’s fiction but it’s such a good little story that pulls back that curtain.
This is put very eloquently, thanks