What Is Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter syndrome is the psychological pattern where someone doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments. This experience is something you’re exposed to early on and throughout your life as a gay man. Why? It’s the coming out story.
You already have a base fear of being rejected for being gay. And that carries through in the queer community. In the spaces where you think you’re going to be accepted most, suddenly you find that there are these exclusionary factions that now see you as a bear or twink or daddy or <gasp> a perceived race outside of the dominate culture’s expectation of what gay is (<30 white fit dude).
In Our Gay Stories with Jerome Harper he touches on imposter syndrome and how it has shown up for him in relationships. You might recognize this experience.
Jerome is sexy, cute, attractive, successful, engaging, and funny. And he’s got a host of other amazing attributes. He’s so skilled at navigating his own introversion that he’s developed personas that can put him at ease in any public place or any event.
He felt as if anytime he thought about approaching another man they’d see him as a fraud. Having an internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud is another aspect of imposter syndrome.
So suddenly, this amazing and talented man, with so much to offer, feels as if everything that makes him amazing is in question. That he could be called out at any moment and in freakin’ public. By men in our own queer community.
Jerome is also quick to admit that every time he pushed through this fear and actually talked to the guy, his fears were unfounded. But it doesn’t diminish the fact that he’s still feeling some kinda way.
What Is An Oppressor
Someone already gave you the fuel to have your own insecurity. They traumatized you. You were exposed to a group that was in power and felt they could make you feel as if you don’t belong. In essence, they oppressed you.
An oppressor is a member of a majority group who holds power. A patriarchal, heterosexual group created the conditions for oppression by generating the experience of what it means to be a man in a relationship. As soon as you recognize that you’re not part of this group the fear of discovery sets in. Then members of the dominate group indirectly or directly oppress you and your experience.
This sets the stage for these same conditions to exist within the queer community. In order to justify your social position in an environment like a gay bar, or a hook up app, you make your “preferences” clear. Today, that comes at the exclusion of another. You already know the line, “no fats, no femmes, no Asians.” And you’d be hard pressed to find this on a profile that wasn’t a white dude who’s benefiting from privilege.
The status hierarchy of societal beauty standards set by industry that develop into pretty/hot, money/popularity, fetish/homogeneity reinforce the practice of oppression within the queer community. And that creates powerful feelings of doubt and anxiety. No wonder Jerome (and I wouldn’t exclude you!) is feeling like an imposter before he even talks to that hot guy he spied across the room!
What Is Conditioning
Conditioning is the experience of growing accustomed to a certain way of being. Jerome mentioned the claws of the queer community as a reference to being attacked if he put himself out there in the Our Gay stories episode that generated this conversation. He was conditioned to believe that he was going to be attacked for being himself.
So then he created personas that could comfortably fit within any situation. As a defense mechanism, they fortified his naturally introverted self so he could find a way to move beyond the imposter syndrome that was reinforcing anxiety and fear.
You might find yourself doing this in situations that you feel threatened in. For example, when you’re in an environment that is overtly heterosexual male. The gay jokes start flying. No one knows you’re gay. (How could they miss it? Who knows…) And in order to fit in, you laugh at the joke while dying a little inside and never revealing that part of yourself. Resentment builds and little by little you enjoy going to work less.
This experience is conditioning you to live in a space of “not-self.” You’re not living to your fullest potential. And you fear discovery. That conditioning carries over into other aspects of your life. Where you start to fear that any large dominate group will reject you for being you.
Suddenly you might start to see yourself as not hairy enough for the bears or to old for the twinks, or not hot enough for the jocks. You’ve been conditioned to see yourself as less than within a dominate culture. And you’ve reinforced the behavior of the oppressor.
You may even reinforce your conditioning as you hope to be accepted into a queer group within the community. And you suddenly complicate the design of who you’re meant to be.
In your conditioning by these oppressive people your experience can create discomfort, anxiety, and a fear of coming out. Which creates a state of “I’m not like you.” And you feel like you could be exposed at any moment.
I Belong Here
To have our own queer community reinforce that we’re not good enough to fit in through imposter syndrome, no matter the room we’re in, with the queer people we had hoped would accept us when these other groups would not is like a stab in the back. No one has a hold on what group can define cultural acceptance. Everyone may have a different nit on what it means to be who you are. But that diminishes your ability to claim who you can be.