David Davis VIII
On imposter syndrome
2020 is the year of the Monkey’s Paw: We’re being punished by getting exactly what we thought we wanted. How many of us with office jobs joked about wanting to work from home permanently, or losing our shitty jobs entirely, or witnessing the regime’s chicken’s come home to roost? (Just you wait, the killjoy ghosts of December 2016 still rave.)
When I’m between jobs, as I was after being laid off in May, I fantasize about getting the chance to work again. When you’re not working but thinking about how someday soon you’ll get the chance to work, money and insurance and all the security they represent start to feel gamified, as tangible as Monopoly money to be hoarded or as magical as Hyrulian rupees that jingle in your digital purse. I was raised by workaholics, both steeped in the very Protestant mindset that it isn’t what you accomplish that matters, but rather how much suffering you undergo on the way—which is a big reason why, as an adult, I’m the kind of person who needs to be hurt real bad in order to relax.
It wasn’t until I began dating a very ambitious Sagittarius in my mid-twenties that I began to adopt her ethos of, “Work smart, not hard,” at least when it came to my day job. I was astounded to learn how little people people with white-collar jobs actually do, and even now am appalled by the amount of busy work, time-wasting, and filler my bullshit job, as David Graeber coined it, entails, especially in comparison to the blue-collar gigs I used to have. Not only are office jobs physically easier, they’re less emotionally arduous. As a rule, there’s no one riding my ass about being more efficient, no one monitoring the length of my bathroom breaks, no need to clock in or out, or to piss into a cup to prove I’m worthy of having an income. Sometimes I still catch myself looking over my shoulder, waiting for an anus-faced little Napoleon who makes $2 an hour more than I to make me do unpaid OT for some made-up infraction.
With a white-collar job, the real labor is in looking like you belong, and I was surprised at how difficult it was to internalize that information. At my office job, no one cared if I worked up a sweat, or followed every rule to a tee, or even did measurably useful stuff like stay late or help someone out on a project that had nothing to do with me—not as much as they cared about how well I dressed, communicated, and socialized like a certain kind of person. You know what kind.
In my industry, there’s some wiggle room for non-conformers, especially if you’re white, but when it comes right down it, the endless interviews, “family”-style and “team-building” corporate culture, and network-based hiring and retention practices, it won’t surprise anyone to learn, are about fitting into a specific socioeconomic profile, with accommodations made for “diversity” when legally mandated. It’s also about milking you of every last drop of time and energy by blurring the lines between “work” and “not work,” “home” and “office,” “fun” and “professional development,” “trust” and “codependence,” and “perk” and “obligation,” which is no different from a blue-collar job, but tends to be done more with the carrot, or the semblance of the carrot, than with the stick. Middle-class workers get carrots, poor workers get sticks. Either way, you’re a donkey.
When I returned to work a few weeks ago, my relief at having gotten what I wanted—a stable F/T gig with insurance, crucial to supporting my chronically ill lifestyle—was countered by the ever-present fear of not conforming well enough to hold onto said gig. Whether it’s my gender presentation, my, uh, background, or the fact that I moonlight as a writer of generally unspeakable things, I simmer in a low-grade panic about not making the grade.
I find the concept of “imposter syndrome” to be annoying, played out, and basically useless. IMO, our understanding of it needs to be tweaked: It’s not that you must defeat the little voice inside you that tells you you’re an imposter because your self-esteem isn’t good enough or whatever, because I think that little voice is correct: You are an imposter and you should not be there. Your white-collar workplace, academic program, or prestigious award was designed for a very specific and select chunk of the labor force, and if you’re second-guessing your presence there, well, have I got news for you: Either you’re less of an imposter than you think or you’ve pulled off a grift. Are you a grifter? Lean into it. Good job on the grift, buddy. Get yours.
Speaking of getting what we want, 2020 is also the year of the hot take. It’s not the first year of the hot take, but rather a continuation in social media’s multi-year project to obliterate everyone’s blood pressure with wild, polarizing claims about cops at pride and who’s allowed to say “Daddy.” The hot take economy keeps us full to bursting with outrage, ire, bile, spleen—all the adrenaline rush we need to keep logging on and screaming at strangers about this or that topic du jour. “Don’t feed the trolls” tastes a little different when you realize that there’s no troll/non-troll binary, but rather a spectrum of activated people antagonizing each other (with varying degrees of intent and purpose, ofc; I don’t want to downplay the literal fascists in our midsts) over minutiae that feels life-or-death in the hypervigilant moment but usually boils down to disagreement or ignorance. Is there a GC-to-TERF-to-Nazi pipeline? Sure. Does a shitty, sex-negative opinion from a 21-year-old white queer who’s had zero interaction with the PIC merit a deep and humiliating dunking? As someone who’s dating a woman who commissioned a bedazzled tank top that says CONFLICT IS NOT ABUSE, what I think is probably obvious.
Will this stop me from weighing in on Twitter, or leveraging piping “hot” takes like “pegging is homophobic” to generate clicks so I can get people to read my content, enriching potential employers and ensuring I get an additional paycheck on top of my regular paycheck so I can keep supporting my family? Obviously not. Even though I hate work, as a concept, I’m still very grateful for it.
David tweets at @k8bushofficial.