Impostor Syndrome is fun!

[trouble]

I'm having horrible impostor syndrome today, woe.


I'm a part-time student, and went part-time because of my husband's health issues. My adviser and the head of the department and I all sat down and had a conversation and this was the decision we thought best, and everyone's been really encouraging, and even the department secretary send me little check-in emails once a month to make sure I'm doing okay.

But everyone else is full-time, and my favourite people are doing their MA-defense in August, and I'm feeling like a total faker because I'm not anywhere close to where I should be if I were a full-time student, and everyone is obviously smarter than me and I'm never going to get accepted for a PhD and everyone hates me and I'm stupid. (Even I can see this logic is flawed, but logic is not part of this.)


I'm assuming that I'm not actually alone in "I suck and I'm only in this program because everyone feels sorry for me." What are you ways of coping? So far I'm just reminding myself that my adviser is well-known for providing blunt commentary on one's papers and mostly she just wants me to use academic language a bit more than I do, so obviously I'm not totally worthless right? right?

So, what are your ways of coping or working past it all?

Comments

[teej]

hey, i'm sorry you're feeling so bad about it right now. i know the feeling well. i saw this post last night and wanted to respond but then i sat there trying to think of how i work past it and realised i didn't know! actually, what you said about your adviser is similar to what i try to remind myself about mine - if she thinks it's ok, it can't be all bad, surely? she certainly lets me know when she thinks something isn't good enough.

for me, these feelings are also always entangled with my general lack of confidence, and depressive tendencies. so sometimes it's about just trying to take a step back and look at the wider context - and often realising hey, maybe i'm feeling so down on my work because i'm generally feeling shitty about everything. and maybe then it's best to take a little time out (however long you can afford) to do something nice. i don't know, that's probably not that helpful - as i said i'm not very good at getting out of these states myself. usually i need someone else to drag me out of it (which is where my supervisor comes in!)

it must be hard to be the *only* person doing part-time, but please remember that has absolutely no bearing on how capable you are of doing the work (i know you know that anyway...) you've obviously got a lot on your plate so another way to see it is that you are even more capable and resourceful because you have to juggle so much and still manage to keep going.