Impostor Syndrome + are you oversharing in the name of 'Authenticity?'

Being both drunk on engagement and greeted by feelings of inferiority is harming you...

“You still don’t know how to write”

That’s what my brain tells my fingers each time I try to push out a tweet

“You still don’t know how much your audience want you to share..”

I hear in a low whisper as I write these words to you now

Sound familiar?

Let’s tackle these together

It involves you attending a school disco somehow…

Honesty and Authenticity

Even when we treat each action as a vote towards the authentic self, we’re going to get it wrong.

I think we have all been drunk and told someone something they didn’t deserve to know about ourselves.

I look back to times with old ‘friends’ at silly o’clock in the morning, fighting the onset of nihilism entering our hearts.

The Twittersphere can form that sort of intoxication, creating a false sense of security.

You think people who follow you are your friends maybe, they lull you into a false sense of security.

Because everyone’s so positive, right?

Maybe you confuse proximity with personability as I did with my friends then.

Unfortunately, they are not the same.

Once these people leave your proximity, you can feel further adrift from that self-understanding you were seeking.

You whored out your innermost secrets… for what?

Maybe you don’t feel like a dirty stop-out, but the onset of self-doubt is the same.

The Disco

Entering into any public endeavour can be daunting.

Think of Twitter as the school disco.

You’re the new kid, your first day.

The cool kids are in the corner on their phones (or doing knee slides across the hall to impress the girls).

You don’t know how to speak to these people, who to approach, how to interface with this alien social setting.

The incentives that lie in validation by numbers is encouraged by the format and removes interpersonal sensitivity, in the same way kids rank each other at the disco based on what trainers they’re wearing.

It prevents the outsider from an in.

These surface-level assumptions are never going to create meaning.

Sartre uses the term ‘being-of-itself’ to describe our non-conscious reality that we exist through, which I think we must displace onto our social media reality.

These numbers and what they mean in terms of our own validation are not universal laws, they are manufactured ideas.

Falsehoods that we cannot let carry our sense of self.

“You will never be happy if you are searching for what happiness consists of.” Camus

You will be even less happy if you place too much of your self-worth in these metrics, they will only heighten your sense of impostorism.

The Solution

The only way out of these thoughts is through them.

I truly believe that is the only reckoning, these algorithms and platforms are designed in a way that ignites innate inferiority.

I did not think I would be hit by impostor syndrome or feelings of inferiority based on a number on a screen that had been assigned to me.

It takes me back to being a 15-year-old kid in school where if you went to a party on the weekend with people from a different school, you’d come back with a load of new Instagram followers

That’s how pathetic and immature we must understand these thoughts to be

Sit with them and be content with them.

But don’t let them stop you from creating

If it still plays on your mind, try write something as short as this I have written and see if it helps

Dear Impostor Syndrome,

Don’t let fleeting feelings of inferiority dim your creative light

WC