The voice that doubts you never really leaves
Growing up with imposter syndrome, and learning how to live beside it.
I don’t remember the first time I felt like a fraud.
And as I think more about this, I start to think that it’s because it was never just one moment. It was more like a background hum, constant, low-grade, threading itself through classrooms, locker rooms, dinner tables, late-night study sessions.
It was something I grew up with—absorbed, really. Inhaled, like something in the air, rather than handed down explicitly.
The air I breathed growing up felt charged with quiet expectations. Subtle ones. Polite, smiling, but heavy. They filled classrooms and locker rooms, tennis courts, long car rides after parent-teacher conferences. Sometimes those expectations came wrapped in praise, sometimes in silence. But they always came with the sense that I was being measured.
The measurements started young.
A teacher glancing at the attendance sheet, stopping on my name, and looking up: “Oh, are you his sister?”
They said my last name like it carried a resume. A forecast. As if they’d already decided who I was before I had a chance to speak. They’d glance around the room, catch my eye, and then launch into how much they loved my brother. How bright he was. How kind. And then, always, something like: “I expect nothing less from you.”
Let me be clear: it was never said with cruelty. Sometimes it was a joke. Sometimes they meant it as encouragement. But it settled into me all the same. A quiet pressure, established on the first day of classes: Be as good. Be better. Don’t disappoint.
Other times it was subtler: a teacher holding my paper up as an example of “doing it right.” A look when I stumbled on a word during a presentation. The sharp, expectant silence when I paused to think. The way people called me “gifted” like it was a fixed condition rather than a child trying hard not to let anyone down.
I laughed. Smiled. Tried to make myself agreeable. Tried to meet whatever version of me they seemed to expect. I didn’t have the language for it at the time, but I understand it a bit better now: how early entanglements between identity and expectation teach you to perform certainty, to search the world for signs you’re enough, instead of looking inward.
I think we tend to talk about imposter syndrome as something inside us, a personal flaw or insecurity. But I think it’s more than that. It’s a reaction to something outside—environments that prize perfection but leave little room for process, that reward a narrow kind of confidence and read anything else as uncertainty.
No wonder we learned to shrink… no wonder silence sometimes felt safer than speaking.
There’s a peculiar pressure in being called “gifted.”
It sounds like praise, but it doesn’t always feel like a gift. It can become a story written for you, one you’re expected to follow without question. A story that rewards the illusion of ease and punishes the reality of effort.
You learn to fear the visible signs of struggle. You learn that ability should look effortless, and anything less feels like proof you’re failing the role you’ve been cast in.
When you’re praised for being exceptional before you’ve even figured out who you are, I’ve found that praise can start to feel more like a contract. It doesn’t really feel like achievement anymore. It feels more like maintenance, like a mask you can’t take off, even when it starts to suffocate.
And when you grow up in a place where your body is already read as different—when you grow up in a predominantly white town as a minority—you carry more than just your name. You carry representation. You carry scrutiny. You carry the sense that being average, even briefly, isn’t just disappointing. It confirms a suspicion no one will say out loud.
You feel it in the silences. In the small shifts in tone. In the weight of being watched.
So… as a kid, you over-prepare. You hold your breath in group settings. You write your answers down just in case you freeze when called on. You master the art of sounding certain even when you’re not. No one ever really demands it, but it’s more so because something in you decided that visibility without perfection was too risky.
By high school, that voice had sharpened.
It spoke in second person. It said: They’re watching.
It said: You don’t get to make mistakes.
It said: If you fall behind even once, they’ll realize you don’t belong here after all.
And it didn’t just live in school. It showed up everywhere. On the tennis court, where I apologized for every missed point. In AP classes, where I began to speak less and less, even when the answers were at the front of my mind. In friendships, where I listened more than I talked, afraid that too much of myself might displace the version they preferred.
And maybe imposter syndrome is more than just a voice, but a dialect: something you grow fluent in without realizing, a vocabulary made of caution and comparison. It’s hard to unlearn a language when it’s been your mother tongue for so long.
I carried that voice into college, thinking maybe it would stay behind like a hoodie I’d outgrown. But it followed me, of course. It changed its shape, but not its message.
In college, the stakes felt higher: everyone around me seemed to have already bloomed. People who spoke with fluency and certainty. People who had mentors and internships and five-year plans. People who started non-profits in high school and spent summers abroad.
And I sat quietly in seminar rooms, afraid to raise my hand in case what I said sounded small. I reread my applications twice before submitting, sometimes three times, convincing myself I didn’t have a chance.
I called it modesty. But underneath, it was fear. It was camouflaged, and practiced, but familiar.
That’s one of the ways imposter syndrome operates, I think. It doesn’t always sound like panic. Sometimes it disguises itself as humility. Sometimes it wears the voice of caution. Sometimes it even sounds like reason: Just be careful. Don’t draw attention. Don’t let them see you try too hard.
Even now, two years post-grad, it’s been changing again. This time, speaking more in comparison.
It’s been living in LinkedIn scrolls and group chats, in passing conversations about promotions or awards or weddings, before unmuting on Zoom, before sending an email.
It’s been whispering: Are you sure you should be here?
And then: What if they find out you shouldn’t?
But the truth is—no, let me say that differently.
What I’ve come to understand, slowly, is that imposter syndrome doesn’t just arrive from nowhere. It’s shaped by the air we breathe. It echoes the systems and expectations that teach us to measure our worth by how seamlessly we fit.
It convinces you that ease is evidence of belonging. That effort is a red flag. That confidence has to be complete, constant, airtight. And once you’ve learned to look through it, it’s hard to see yourself any other way. And it’s convincing because it sounds like something you've always known.
It tells you you’re being humble when you’re really hiding, convinces you that effort disqualifies you, that ease equals legitimacy, that anything that takes struggle or repetition must mean you’re doing it wrong.
And the thing I’m still figuring out is this: the voice doesn’t always go away.
Sometimes it softens. Sometimes it shouts. Sometimes it’s just there, sitting next to me like a shadow that never quite detaches.
I used to think the goal was to defeat it: to finally arrive at a version of myself that was so accomplished, so unshakable, so capable that the voice would get bored and leave. That it wouldn’t dare speak anymore.
But maybe the work isn’t about banishing it or winning a final battle. Maybe it’s about learning to hear it without obeying. To notice it’s there without letting it decide the path. To carry it lightly, as a companion.
Some days—most days—it still sits with me. Makes me doubt. Sometimes I let it win.
But here I am, anyways. Writing. Trying. Which must count for something.
This essay is part of a conversation I’m still having with myself: about doubt, belonging, and what it means to carry a voice that never quite quiets. Maybe learning to live with that voice, rather than silence it, is the work that lasts a lifetime.
Thanks for reading, as always. :)