FlashFiction.Net

Writing in Psychology Today, Satoshi Kanazawa discusses impostor syndrome: "Many highly accomplished women suffer from the feeling that they are impostors and they do not belong where they are and they don’t deserve what they have accomplished through their own talent and hard work." I shall add this to my list of "disorders" I share with women, including (but not limited to) mitral valve prolapse, a grouchy bowel, and, for a brief time in fifth grade, the anticipatory anxiety of getting one's period.

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The site "Ovecoming the Impostor Syndrome" asks these questions:

• Do you secretly worry that others will find out you’re not as intelligent and competent as they seem to think you are?


• Do you often dismiss your accomplishments as a “fluke” or “no big deal?”


• Do you sometimes shy away from challenge because of nagging self-doubt?


• Are you crushed by even constructive criticism, taking it as evidence of your ineptness?

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They should end with this question: Are you a writer? I know that this sense that "I don't belong" drives me to prove that I do, and each "success" fills me with the anxiety that I will be discovered for the fraud that I am. However, at the same time I am driven by the doubt to write more, succeed more, in an effort to silence that nagging internal critic. My guess is that, if I were to cure myself of this impostor syndrome, that I would be at a loss as to what to write for. I am both driven crazy and to write by this fear of being found out, like the Wizard behind the emerald curtain.

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Flash is the right place for such anxiety, methinks. If indeed every word is both proof of my fraudulence and evidence against it, then imagine the tension and charged urgency that takes place in the compressed space of flash fiction. As in Gulliver's Lilliput, things are both small (the Lilliputians) and enlarged (Gulliver's faults), and this desire to send something small into the world and make it matter seems perfectly suited for the impostor syndrome sufferer.

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I tell people, if I'm able to tell them that I'm a writer (rarely), that I write very tiny things. They want to know "How tiny?"--and that I think is an accomplishment, to get them wondering how small a writing might be to allow someone to still call himself a writer. I tell them only 100 words or so, and they look at me the way Dorothy looked toward Toto as he exposed the wonderful wizard of oz. I've come to love that look, all that it uncovers. I have impostor syndrome, I can say now, to explain it all. "Oh," they might say. "That does explain things, doesn't it?"