Controlling the outcome, or, what Hacks has to teach us about imposter syndrome
An illustration by John Hain from Pixabay: The letters F, E, A, and R are on a orange-yellow gradient, and inside each letter are words related to fear in evocative lettering.
Earlier this summer, I binge-watched Hacks. I wasn't a fan at first—honestly the sniping back and forth between the two main characters stressed me tf out! But the more I watched, the more I connected with Deborah (Jean Smart) and Ava (Hannah Einbinder). Ultimately, this show is about their struggle to create something great, how they get blocked getting there, and how they wrangle their way out of it, every time.
I don't want to spoil too much, but Deborah, the aging comedienne, has always been haunted by a very public failure in her youth. Just as she's about to get the show she lost, the one she’s wanted for decades, she gets in her head.
What if she fucks it up again?
What if “they” were right about her and she really can't do the thing?
What if she never deserved this chance, and she's just been deluding herself?
In other words, Deborah is incapacitated with the dreaded imposter syndrome.
Imposter syndrome plagues everyone, to some extent, but our cultural myths about creativity make it extra toxic for and prevalent among artists.
When I say artists here, I almost always mean everyone who creates—visual artists, writers, performers, musicians, folk artists, etc. The term “creatives” used to be and still would be fantastic as an umbrella term, but it's been coopted by tech bros and “content” mills, so here I'll just call all y'all (myself included) artists, no matter your medium.
Artists have impossible shoes to fill. We're supposed to be tortured, but passionately in love with our subjects and prolific in our output. We're told alcohol and drugs make us more deep, and that mental illness makes us more real. We're told only very special people can be creative, and anyone else trying is wasting not just their time, but the time of everyone around them. We're told all of the horror stories—Van Gogh's mental illness and death, the tragedies of the 27 club—and then mocked for continuing to try. And then, after all of that, we're told we're replaceable, because the AI that was trained on our stolen art can do it better. (insert me ranting for hours, because AI is bullshit)
Then we add all of our personal pain—the way we were told making art was silly when we were kids, or that our art specifically wasn't good enough or special enough. Add to that
the criticism of trusted teachers and friends,
the sabotage from other blocked creatives,
the parts we didn't get (or got, then lost, à la Deborah in Hacks)
the sales we haven’t made, that we might never make
and the ways we tell ourselves we never deserved our heart's desire.
Honestly, is it any wonder we feel like imposters?
After all, combining this horrifying societal messaging with our inner critics is the ideal breeding ground for imposter syndrome.
Originally known as “the imposter phenomenon,” imposter syndrome was a description of the results of a 1978 study by Drs Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Ament Imes. An article from McLean Hospital describes their results below:
Clance and Imes observed the experiences of 150 women who earned PhDs, were respected professionals in their fields, or were students recognized for their academic excellence. Despite success or praise from others, these women continued to believe they were not bright, had achieved their success from sheer luck, and that they had managed to fool everyone regarding their intelligence and capability.
Sound familiar?
It certainly is to me. I still fight the urge to tell people my PhD is no big deal, that getting papers published and my art in books doesn't matter that much, that my art show was too small to count, that I could know more, do more, be more.
And every time I say that to another person, they stare at me, agog. They don't have all my baggage, all the internal monologues about how every setback or failure is epic. So they see me more clearly. They see the things I've done, and, to them, my self-deprecation makes no sense.
But imposter syndrome isn't about facts, and it can’t be cured by other people’s good opinions of us.
Imposter syndrome is about all the ways society warps our perceptions, it's about what we feed our inner critic when we're feeling low, it's about messages we got in our childhood that killed our dreams, and, yes, it's about all the times things didn't work out, and our unprocessed feelings about that. It isn’t based in facts. And once we’re afflicted with it, we’re 1000% more likely to believe criticism than praise.
Back to Hacks. Deborah is losing it on the eve of her big break. Her confidence is gone, and the stakes are higher than they've ever been. So she goes to the home of the tv exec who originally killed her dream, and they have this conversation:
Deborah: I was just in the neighborhood, and, uh, my day suddenly opened up. And I wanted to talk to you about my new show. Well, before I do all this again…I really need to know why it didn’t work the first time.
Exec: You know. The house fire, the bad press.
Deborah: I know. I know. I’ve just always thought that…if I’d been a little bit better, a little bit funnier, if I’d been undeniable…it could have happened.
Exec: This is the problem with you creatives. You think it’s all about talent and hard work. “The harder I work, the more successful I’ll be.”
It’s true. It is. But it’s also about luck. And you can’t control luck. You guys want it so bad, you trick yourself into thinking you can.
Deborah, you were undeniable. In the history of our network, we never had a pilot that tested that well. It went through the roof.
Deborah: Seriously?
Exec: Yeah. But it didn’t matter because it wasn’t about good or funny. We just couldn’t handle all that bad publicity. […]
Deborah, there are a million factors in getting a show on the air or keeping it on the air. With a woman, make it a million and one. You’re talented. Everybody knows that. You work hard. Everybody knows that. All you gotta do is pray that something doesn’t happen that gives them an excuse to say no. Other than that, good luck.
Hacks, Season 3, episode 9
Imposter syndrome tells us if we could just be better, we could control all outcomes. It's a way, our terrified brains tell us, to future-proof us against disappointment. If we feel like failures, well, then if we fail it won't be as devastating. If we don't put ourselves out there because we're not enough yet—even if there's ample evidence that we have been and continue to be enough—then we save ourselves the pain.
But none of that actually works. Deborah has been angsting about her failure for decades, and all she’s gotten is more entrenched in fear and grief and self-flagellation. And now, this self-doubt, this imposter syndrome, is trying to sabotage her huge success.
Worst of all, the so-called failure was never her fault at all! It was all bad luck, with more than a soupçon of misogyny to blame for flavor.
Now, look. I'm not blaming Deborah. I get it. I'm not blaming you. Hell, most of the time, I'm not even blaming myself. Imposter syndrome is strongly coded into our societal DNA, and it's used quite frequently to take down shining stars who feel threatening to the status quo (Deborah, again). There's a reason the study I quoted above from 1978 studied women—we are more prone to imposter syndrome because society tells us a good woman is demure. She doesn't brag. She doesn't put herself out there. If we break the rules, we deserve the imposter syndrome we get. If a similar study was conducted today, hopefully they'd extend the parameters to include everyone who's not a cishet white dude (though that would mean no government funding for said study, because we’re in a white supremacist, gender normative, transphobic, misogynistic, capitalist hellscape).
None of us deserve imposter syndrome. Let me repeat: no one deserves to feel like an imposter if they’re putting their creations into the world, even on the smallest scale, even in total privacy.*
We do deserve to expand and give our gifts to the world.
Given all of this, you might not believe me. You might thing YOU are the rare exception who deserves to feel like an imposter, because you’re xyz.
I get it—15 years ago me definitely wouldn't believe me either. So, perhaps what I can leave you with instead is the feeling that you're in good company. Below you’ll find quotations from a lot of famous artists who struggle with imposter syndrome even as we all rave about their work.
Albert Einstein:
“The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”
Van Gogh:
I am terribly inadequate. It is always my great fear that my art will appear so awkward and unfinished that people will take me for a madman.
What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart.
Maya Angelou
“Each time I write a book, every time I face that yellow pad, the challenge is so great,” Angelou said. “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody and they’re going to find me out.”
Tom Hanks:
“No matter what we’ve done, there comes a point where you think, ‘How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?
David Bowie:
“Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all. I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor:
“I have spent my years since Princeton, while at law school and in my various professional jobs, not feeling completely a part of the worlds I inhabit. I am always looking over my shoulder wondering if I measure up.”
Meryl Streep:
“You think, ‘Why would anyone want to see me again in a movie? And I don’t know how to act anyway, so why am I doing this?’
Kate Winslet:
“Sometimes I wake up in the morning before going off to a shoot, and I think, ‘I can’t do this. I’m a fraud.’” She added, “What people really think of me is something I remain blissfully unaware of most of the time. I love acting and all I ever try to do is my best. But even now I always dread those emotional scenes. I’m there thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m rubbish and everyone is going to see it. They’ve cast the wrong person.’ But I have to come to realize that those nerves are all part of the process for me.”
Reach out to me if you want to work on fighting the imposter-syndrome monster—I’m here to take your side in the battle, because I know you have wondrous creations inside of you!
*If you’re stealing other people’s work and calling it being an artist, then you do deserve imposter syndrome, because you are in fact an imposter. You are not creating by typing a prompt into a plagiarism machine that lies. Fuck AI, ChatGPT, Grok—all that noise that is destroying our world.