There's a word for that!

I had this friend in high school, Monique. She was a year older than I. She was an artist. We used to talk about how all of the people at school were in this Conglomerate Mass of Humanity, of conformity, and it wouldn't matter what we did in life; we would never be part of that Conglomerate Mass. (Even if we tried.) Being a visual artist, Monique would describe the theory in visual terms, and I visualized it as looking something like this:




I included "You" in this rendition, because clearly, if you're here in my private blogospace, you're not a part of the Conglomerate Mass. You're special.

That's right. :) You're like a rare flower or wild lizard.

I have written here before about how I feel like an impostor at work, like everyone else there is a grown-up doing a grown-up job, and I'm just a kid messing around.

Also, I feel like other women with children are mothers, but I'm like someone who happens to have a kid. I am often confused by the things that the mothers do, and I wonder, Should I be doing that? Is there something I'm missing here? What's going on?

I feel like an anthropologist or an observer when I am actually among people like me, doing normal things. Like shopping. There are a bunch of ladies there, pushing carts around, so why do I have these sort of out-of-body experiences while shopping? What the hell is all this stuff for?

I guess it really stems from being weird by nature. I had this teacher in college who kept telling us to "think outside the box" about teaching methods, and I kept saying, "But where's the box? What's inside the box? I don't know where the box is! Good God where is this box???!!!"

But there is some hope. I almost have a syndrome. Clearly, if there's a Wikipedia on it, it's important and stuff. Hallelujah! There are people like me! I discovered today that there is a name for it: Impostor Syndrome. Of course!

I wonder what a support group of people with Impostor Syndrome would look like? If you really wanted to mess with people at an Impostor Syndrome meeting, you could say, "Hey, you don't have Impostor Syndrome! You bastard, coming to meetings for a syndrome you don't even have! Who do you think you are?"



Also, you should read this. Unrelated, mostly, but still.