On Impostor Syndrome

How do we get over the paralysing feeling of not being good enough? Here are my thoughts on the number one fear in most of the creative people I know (including myself).

Feb 16, 2024

This (and a myriad of related questions) is something I have always asked myself, but especially over the past couple of years. As a creative person who likes to keep her fingers in many pies, I struggle with defining what I do, and more importantly, whether I have the right or not to call myself professional in all such areas.

I am a graphic designer, sure. I can confidently say that because I have two degrees to show for it and almost fifteen years of experience. That’s easy.

I also take pictures for a living, but am I a photographer?

I have designed the interiors of a couple of houses (including my own), can I call myself an interior designer now?

I love food, but I’m definitely not a chef. Can I even classify as a Cook (with Capital C)?

I am writing this article. Does that make me a writer?

And so on.

How do I move forward from here?

Feeling like you are not “good enough to be considered X” seems like a red thread that links many creatives, particularly (and from my observation, disproportionately) women. My uber-talented and all-round wonderful husband, who is also a Graphic Designer, seems to be immune to such qualms. He has zero problems, in fact, taking on new challenges on a job, confidently stepping outside his comfort zone doing something he has never done before, and charging a fair amount whilst doing so. Meanwhile, here I am pondering for days on end how much I should be charging for x,y and z, and if it isn’t too much.

I know what you might be thinking: ugh, typical white straight guy behaviour. It would be too easy to put it all down to that. The truth is, I don’t blame him for it (he always delivers amazing results, and good for him) – if anything, I am a little jealous of his unwavering sense of worth, his razor-sharp conviction in his own abilities. I wish I was more like him.

Impostor Syndrome is a topic that I feel deeply, and I always enjoy hearing other people’s take on it. The interior/food wonder Athena Calderone talks about this issue very candidly on her podcast More Than One Thing, where she describes the paralysing feeling of not knowing what you are meant to be because you are constantly hopping from creative pursuit to creative pursuit, never satiated with just One Thing. It can end up leaving you feeling like you are Jack of all trades, Master of None, that you haven’t spent enough time in each realm to be taken seriously. She even coined a word to describe these creative butterflies: the multi-hyphenates.

I have never felt more seen.

Before I opened The Venetian Pantry, and started dabbling in all my creative pursuits on a more systematic level, I was merely a Graphic Designer. I studied and worked hard to become one, and I remember vividly feeling frustrated at the ever-growing herds of self-proclaimed Graphic Designers, who sold their services based on the fact they could use Photoshop. That’s cheating, I thought.

Now, a few years down the line, I am starting to wonder if I have become one of those people who used to irritate me so much. Do I irk people in the same way? Do other photographers, the “serious” ones, the ones that have 7 figures worth of equipment neatly stored in their carrier bags, look down on me for professing to be also a photographer?

In an effort to quench my own sense of impostorship, I have tried to answer that one question, the one I started this article with. What gives any of us the right to call ourselves a “professional someone”?

The way I see it, there could be as many as Five parameters to define such a thing.

1. Education

This seems to be the obvious starting point, and for many professions, a quite essential one at that. Naturally, you want your GP to have a serious medical qualification. But when it comes to creative professions, things get much murkier. I doubt that most of the finest chefs in the world have a degree in culinary sciences, for example. And, just to play devil’s advocate, I’m pretty sure there are plenty of “qualified” designers whose work pales compared to certain not formally trained colleagues.

So there goes that theory.

2. Experience

Ok, if we can’t count on a piece of paper for validation, surely experience is what really matters?

Yes and no.

Again, a young emerging chef might be ten times more brilliant than someone who has worked twenty years in a kitchen. And besides, it seems to me that experience is yet another slippery slope, a spectrum on which it’s very hard to pinpoint the threshold into professionalism. As a graphic designer, the system has always been divided into tiers of experience: between 0 to 3 years, you are a junior designer; 3-5, a middleweight designer; and so on. But that system is based on the ground zero that is your degree. And if you don’t have one, what then?

3. Peer recognition

One could argue that you can safely assume you are a Professional when you start receiving the acknowledgement from the community of Peers – aka other Professionals in that field. Although it feels nice (more than nice actually) to be recognised by your Peers, and have a network of like-minded individuals to share your work with and learn from, I have one issue with this method: namely that it relies on an external variable that is out of our control (and if you know anything about me, you’ll know that I am a control freak). It seems somewhat wrong to seek validation from someone else. But then again, isn’t that how Work works, in general?

4. Remuneration

One theory that I heard going around a lot is the following: you can consider yourself a Professional from the moment you get paid to do what you do. This seems like a fairly democratic way of looking at things, with your clients being the ultimate judges of whether you are good enough to provide a service or product. Of all the options explored so far, this seems to make the most sense to me. Yet the fact that someone is willing to pay someone else to do a job, doesn’t necessarily mean they are proficient at it, or even (and perhaps most importantly) good at it. Think of a teenage babysitter, for instance. Would you call them a professional childminder?

I didn’t think so.

5. Talent

So when everything else fails, there is one thing left to examine, and that is Talent. Regardless of your diplomas (or lack thereof), years of experience, and whether you managed to get a paid commission or not, Talent is ultimately what makes someone good at their job. Right? We can dwell on here and open a can of worms (is Talent innate or can it be cultivated? Nature or nurture? And who is the judge of that?) but I feel like we would be tangling ourselves in more loops.

The truth is, I still don’t have an answer to that original question. This is less of an attempt to find the solution, and more of a cry out to open the conversation and discuss together.

Perhaps collectively, we can work it out.

The Venetian Pantry