Selective Amnesia and the Imposter Syndrome
My father once recited Rudyard Kipling’s If to me. I loved it and resonated with every line in that poem. But some of those lines I hold fast to. One of them is: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same:” Because of that line, whether it is a personal win, a loss, a success, a failure, an achievement, something to be proud of, or something to be ashamed of, I savour it or stew in it for a day, maximum two, then I forget about it. When I say forget, I mean I wipe it from my mind. It is as if it never happened. Unless I am reminded of it. And if I am, like a Mogura Tataki game, I hammer it down, with a vengeance. I don’t let success or failure linger, stick or settle. I move on from it. Good or bad, the moment is over. It’s a clean slate moving forward. But behaving so strictly with myself leads me to Imposter Syndrome, that pervasive, persistent sense of incompetence we feel about ourselves. It does not matter if we have awards, accomplishments or acclaim from others, in our own eyes, we suck, we sucked and we are going to suck. What we did never seems good enough. We can only appreciate our own shortcomings and have great difficulty acknowledging our strengths. There are times I tire of not being able to shake that feeling of inadequacy. There are times when I would like the simple pleasure of savouring my petit accomplishment and feeling worthy of myself. But it’s difficult. Because I impose selective amnesia over whatever I do, feelings of unworthiness constantly dog me because I feel I have accomplished nothing and have wasted my life. But as much as there is that part of me that longs for that sense of satisfaction, there’s that other part of me that strongly resists savouring the pleasure of my accomplishments – to treat them the same as my failures i.e., to forget them completely. Because I know that if I savour what little success I have too much, it will lead me to the opposite of the Imposter Syndrome, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That effect describes when we overestimate our abilities about something, especially when we have no or low abilities to do that something. I prefer to call the Dunning-Kruge Effect the Asshole Syndrome because it pointedly and more vividly makes the point. I am infected with the Asshole Syndrome when I think too highly of my own efforts, abilities and accomplishments. It invariably leads me to make the mistake many intelligent people are prone to make – thinking intelligence is a zero-sum game, which means if they are intelligent, it means others do not. It has the tendency to infect those with a high degree of intelligence. Suppose you hear me pompously spouting out rubbish, speaking condescendingly to another, or casually dismissing someone, that’s the Asshole Syndrome in effect. And I apologize in advance. If there’s one thing, worse than suffering from Imposter Syndrome is suffering from Asshole Syndrome. With Imposter Syndrome, we just beat ourselves up. But with Asshole Syndrome, everyone else gets beat up. When I slip into that mode, I can feel myself getting complacent about myself and my abilities. I start thinking too highly of myself and less of others. I don’t feel the need to improve. I coast. After all, how does one improve on perfection? That’s what makes the Asshole Syndrome dangerous, the complacency and dismissiveness it breeds. I used to vacillate between these two states when I was unable to inhabit the middle ground between them. These syndromes are not an intellectual choice but an emotional and psychological state we slip into if we are not vigilant over ourselves. Of late, I have embraced my Imposter Syndrome. I think it is the ‘healthier’ of the two syndromes. If I cannot arrogate the middle ground, I choose to err on the side of thinking myself incompetent. I have come to accept the default position of being inadequate and unworthy and in doing so, I have discovered relief and respite from the need to be more than I think myself to be. If I can’t, I can’t; if I can, I can. The Imposter Syndrome also accords with my outlook professionally and personally. Professionally, as a lawyer, I am only as good as my last case. Nobody cares about a winning or significant case I did ten years back or even yesterday. All that matters is what I can do for the client now. To be and stay sharp for the now, I have to prove myself over and over again. There are no free passes for a professional. So, there is no point in remembering my past successes and glorifying them. It’s over; it won’t win me my next case. Instead, I might lose my next case. Thinking about how great I thought myself back then does not help me in doing great work now. The past is the past and it is over. Previous success is no guarantee of future performance. To insulate myself from the anxiety of ‘success’, I cultivate amnesia if not discount greatly whatever meagre success and accomplishments I thought I achieved. Professionally, I approach my cases with the Zen idea of a Beginner’s Mind i.e., I assume nothing and possess no preconceived notions about anything be it the facts or the law. To have a Beginner’s Mind is to have an empty mind. I know that doesn’t sound ‘right’. But an empty mind does not lock me into a particular mode of thinking or come to a conclusion too quickly. An empty mind has immense space for me to listen carefully and sensitively. An empty mind allows me greater freedom to think about the problem and to entertain solutions no matter how absurd at first glance. A full mind has no room for possibilities. Personally, thinking of
