Familiar in a Different Way: Navigating Imposter Syndrome
During your first year at university, you may feel as if you are malleable. You may perceive university as an omnipotent force that can reconstruct every part of yourself that you have stabilized. It is common to feel like you are roaming through the hallways vacantly, an anomaly among the worthy, or anchored to what you used to know so fluently. This sensation is called imposter syndrome. The word that is at its core self-doubt. However, although the what-ifs may seem perturbing right now, change is a conniver.
As a first-year, I have realized that university demands a completely different version of me, which is universally inevitable yet ironically unforeseen. In high school, you may have developed a structure that contributed to your linear ebb and flow. Moreover, you may have been more of an extrovert or more translucent because the familiar environment enabled that part of you. Finally, you may have felt more credible, like you knew yourself; you knew what you could achieve, who you liked to spend time with, and what you were comfortable with. I believe that to know is efficient but also to be stagnant. I do not believe that you are meant to know all the time, which can be anxiety-inducing; however, it eradicates the interdependence that limits the opportunities to soak up life. To navigate the perturbing thoughts, you must let go; to live your life, you must let go because there is no equilibrium in comparison. I mean that the duration of a year is uncoordinated, and life’s puppeteers of your machinery are arbitrary. You cannot control that university is completely different from high school, and you are not meant to. You may feel foreign to yourself because you are, but that does not mean the void of emotions must be administered by doubt. Acknowledge that it is new and invent something out of that. Make some alterations in what you desire, wallow in your emotions, become pliant, or become impossible to define. You have the liberty to claim ownership of who you want to be, and if that is incompatible with last year, that is okay.
Your high school self is a penumbra; they are partially among you. However, maybe they are just not meant to exist at this time of your life. Time brings knowledge, and you will know familiarity again in a different way.