The Impetuous Pestery of the Impostor
I had a real doozer of a dream a few nights ago, friends. A super-duper pulse-pounding, heart-hammering, nerve-knotting nightmare of a doozer. Anybody else here seeing an uptick in wild and wily dreams lately? Yeah, I’m not surprised to see a few nods out there. After all, there’s no grist for the ol’ dream mill quite like a steady supply of fascist f*ckery. And we’ve all got way more of that these days than we can properly metabolize during our waking hours.
Speaking of which, before I get into the dream, I can’t *not* mention something. But first, I’ll mention that using the word “mention” in connection with what I’m about to mention fills me with no small amount of chacringe (yes, I just combined chagrin and cringe…neither on their own seem even remotely adequate). Because what I’m about to merely mention here deserves so much more than a mere mention. It deserves all the outrage that could possibly be expressed by all the words in all the languages, a million times over. But instead, it’s getting this woefully insufficient mention:
The forced starvation in Gaza, which bears repeating. The forced starvation in Gaza, especially juxtaposed as it is, in a most ghoulish way, against summertime scenes of relative normalcy. Like blithely licking ice cream cones on seaside strolls or sitting around campfires roasting marshmallows for our s’mores. And I don’t know about you, but the forced starvation of Gaza feels like a constant weight pressing in on my heart, my soul, and now my fingers as I write to you about things that seem to have nothing, but in fact have everything, to do with it. And because of that, and also because the handful of constructive things I know to do with my grief and outrage over it just aren’t cutting it, I’m compelled to make this mention. This mention which doesn’t really help, but feels like something, even if it’s barely anything at all.
Conscious breathing: not a solution, but still good for the nervous system.
Okay, the dream. There I was, sitting at a dark old claw-footed dining table, having dinner with a friend and her family. This friend happened to be a trans femme person, and her father — a very patriarchal patriarch — happened to be a dour, sour curmudgeon’s curmudgeon (need a visual? I’ve got just the one). As this persnickety patriarch presided over the dinner table, he emphatically and obnoxiously misgendered and deadnamed my friend as he simultaneously sermonized on what he viewed as the moral turpitude of “transgenderism.”
At least he *began* with sermonizing. Before long though, he moved on to heavy-duty humiliating, blatant belittling, callous castigation, and cruel condemnation of not just my friend, but of me and all trans people far and wide. And as this malevolent miscreant’s invective about our alleged infractions escalated, so did my outrage. Conversely, my dream friend shrank ever deeper into herself, growing smaller and smaller, as though she might disappear altogether.
Finally, at the climax of his caterwauling, dystopic dream dad slammed his fist down on the table, sending silverware flying, and landed this blow: Trans people are a fictionauthored by forces of evil, and they must be banned like the bad books they are! And then? Then, I woke up. I felt like I’d been chewing wood chips for hours and washing them down with a six-pack of Red Bull.
The telltale look of one adrenalized well beyond legal limits.
What was most awful about this dream, though, wasn’t the physical discomfort of the tension in my tissues. It was how familiar it felt on an emotional level. The swirl of sediment it stirred was something I’d been caught in many times. And this swirl always had, at its center, a tarry and malignant mess of self-doubt that was the perfect substrate for terrible questions to feed on. What if they’re right? What if I’m just phony baloney? What if being trans is a just a figment of a disturbed imagination? What if I AM crazy?
Friends, impostor phenomenon is by no means the exclusive domain of trans people. Impostor phenomenon, in fact, does not discriminate based on gender identity or any other demographic - it can strike anyone, for any number of reasons. And it’s a potentially lethal bite for anyone into whom it injects its poison. That said, there *is* a particular kind of impostor phenomenon exclusive to LGBTQIA+ people. And you may or may not be surprised to learn that it’s known as:
To be clear, this is not a diagnosable pathology. But friends, let me tell you — firsthand — that it’s real. And it’s also as common as the cold among queer and trans folks. I shall attempt to explain, from my perspective, why this is so.
Go ahead and grab some refreshments, friends. I’ll wait.
First, some of us in the QT community have spent years to decades of our lives trying to fold our identities into the confines of cis-normative and/or hetero-normative identities. In other words, we camped out in the closet for a *long time*, and camping in the claustrophobia of that closet requires a truly profound level of self-abandonment. It demands disconnection from our bodies, constant masking, and a lot of performing, otherwise known as faking. And the longer we do it, the greater the wear and tear on our sense of self.
For those of us who mortgaged ourselves for the title to that terribly tiny closet, there’s often a next-level inconvenient truth. When we at long last manage to pry open the door of the closet, remove the mask and walk away, we find that our impostor has followed us. This strikes us as very rude indeed, considering the fact that most of us haven’t invited it help look for our happy place somewhere over the rainbow. We can’t believe it. We may no longer be feeling like a fraud for faking a cis and/or hetero identity, but now we’re questioning whether we’re queer “enough” to belong in the QT community.
I thought I remembered to lock the closet door behind me.
Sadly, this “not-enough to belong” idea is sometimes reinforced by brittle concepts among even the QT community of what it means to be queer or trans. Concepts rooted in the rigidity of the gender binary and/or reactions to it and the patriarchy. For instance, when I first came out almost 25 years ago, being queer was still largely a gendered experience. If you were assigned female at birth, you were a lesbian. If you were assigned male at birth, you were a gay man. This was true regardless of the gender you presented, unless you medically transitioned to the other side of the binary. Nonbinary and other gender diversity wasn’t yet on the menu in those days, and those as-yet unnamed more expansive identities were shoved to the margins.
Nowadays, at least in the area where I live, I’ve seen the reverse taking shape. More fluid or expansive identities sometimes disdaining those who still identify as male or female, and/or also those whose relationships might appear to reinforce gender roles as defined by patriarchy.
The binary divides, in myriad of ways.
This leads us directly to the door of what may be the most insidious impostor layer of all: the current concerted efforts of cis-hetero-normative overculture to undermine QT (and particularly T) legitimacy, sabotage our right to exist publicly, and erase us entirely from the public vernacular.
I probably don’t need to explain that any further. But it’s even worse than it sounds, because although the government hasn’t always been so hell-bent on targeting QT people for annihilation, these messages have been around since practically forever and have become deeply internalized by all of us. Even those of us who’ve had the great fortune of supportive friends, families or allies and even those of us who live proud out loud. And of course they have. How could they not, when we’re bombarded by them in 360° surround sound, 24x7?
Internalized oppression delivers a special brand of fatigue.
So what’s the upshot of living with a lurker like a strong impostor? In my experience, it follows a pretty well-worn trajectory:
internal dissonance —>self-doubt —>shame and loneliness —>serious malaise (depression, anxiety, physical symptoms, relational problems or all of the above+)
This also means that even when we’re surrounded by people — even if they’re people who adore us — we often still feel desperately alone. Why? Because the impostor ensures that we stay isolated in our fortress of shame. In its way of thinking, job number one is to keep any and every one from discovering our fakery. At all costs.
Ironically, the impostor’s most effective strategy for keeping us in lock-down seems to be to disconnect us from ourselves. It does this by taking on a life of its own, as though it were a separate entity barking at us like that dystopic dream dad of mine. It’s a genius move, really. Because to keep us disconnected from ourselves guarantees that we can never have very satisfying intimacy with anyone else. It can get us to shrivel right up and shut right down, just like that dream friend of mine.
If I can’t see the real me, then you can’t either.
This is both good and bad news, friends. It’s fantastic news in the sense that once we know this, we can start having conversations with the impostor. We can get to know its fears and its logic. We can extend it empathy, then broaden its contextual understanding of reality. We can gently invite it to mingle more with the rest of us so that it isn’t stuck in some hall of mirrors all alone.
It’s also bad news in the sense that this can be a lot of work and require Olympic-level patience with a potentially long process. But like any process, we can take breaks, avail ourselves of support, and look for models of inspiration.
Regardless of any of our demographics or psychographics, we’ve all got at least one thing in common. The longest relationship we will ever have is with ourselves. We are the only one guaranteed to be with us from day first to day last. So it makes sense to make sure we’re getting along with ourselves, don’t you think?
