Truly Outrageous

Yesterday I wandered over to Queer Dewd’s blog to find a mention of Impostor Syndrome, something I’d never heard of until a few weeks ago when my friend Rebka came to visit. According to the Bible of the Internet,

Individuals experiencing this syndrome seem unable to internalize their accomplishments. Regardless of what level of success they may have achieved in their chosen field of work or study, or what external proof they may have of their competence, they remain convinced internally that they do not deserve the success they have achieved and are really frauds. Proofs of success are dismissed as luck, timing, or otherwise having deceived others into thinking they were more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be.

Initial studies of the phenomenon indicated women were more prone to feeling themselves ‘imposters’. Now it’s high achievers in general.

From what little I’ve read wandering around on the intertubes, this syndrome could just be a convenient name for other issues (that have a lot more to do with anxieties on a societal level than any mental illness or disorder in the DSM-IV). At any rate, I’m less interested in finding neat labels — as will hopefully become clear — than in using the term as a starting point for some thoughts I’ve had recently about the self, and how it figures into politics, aesthetics and the everyday.

Trying to source the beginning of my (current) thoughts on this is difficult. JK wrote recently on loss:

So, the necessary condition for making peace with the past is the forgetting of the past, and that forgetting takes the form of turning the past into a story that combines fondness with resignation. [...] My ideal relation to the past has nothing to do with making peace.

Brownfemipower shared Andrea Smith’s ideas on the displacement of the center in radical women of color theory:

An alternative approach to “inclusion” is to place women of color at the center of the organizing and analysis of domestic violence. What if we do not make any assumptions about what a domestic violence program should look like, but instead ask: What would it take to end violence against women of color? What would this movement look like? What if we do not presume that this movement would necessarily have anything we take for granted in the current domestic violence movement? Beth Richie suggests that we need to go beyond just centering our analysis on women of color. Rather, she asks, what if we centered our attention on those abused women most marginalized within the category of “women of color?” This approach is of utmost importance because it is within this context, she argues, that we must ultimately “be accountable not to those in power, but to the powerless.” She is not suggesting that we have a permanent category in the center of analysis (i.e., women of color) , but that we constantly shift the center of analysis to multiple perspectives to ensure that we are developing a holistic strategy for ending violence. [emphasis added by BFP]

I constantly explain my past to whoever will listen. I love structure, I love lists, and I love cause and effect. I want to believe that every part of my life will ultimately become a seamless entry in my own mythology. At the same time I am aware of my self-indulgence.

thinking girl has a post up about identity, in which she answers a series of questions, which include:

How does having/maintaining an identity detract/support one being their authentic self?

Do you ever ask yourself who and what you are, who and what you are supposed to be and whether you are being your truest self?

They also include questions addressing the issue of labels and limiting our perceptions of others:

When we confront people as labels or categories, how does that affect our ability to see them for who they are?

Is having a simplistic, hand-me-down identity a form of ’security,’ and a strength or an ‘escape’ from the anxiety of growing into something beyond the flowerbox you were planted in? Or both?

The implication is that identity limits our ability to understand a person in their totality; it blinds us from new information in a constant effort to be Right, as Nezua writes. This is an opinion I wholeheartedly agree with, and that is demonstrated in a story over at Ballastexistenz involving three doctors and entirely too many parakeets.

But there is also this idea that labels/identities enable a ‘forest for the trees’ mindset — we’re missing out on the whole. Over at thinking girl’s I wrote in response:

I think the idea of a ‘true self’ is pretty fascinating… what the hell is that? If we are constantly negotiating our identities there is no stable or true self, no ‘whole’ as we like to imagine it, and beating ourselves up about how we might obscure ourselves from it through any one identity is just an exercise in guilt.

Labels close off possibilities, but so does this (w)holistic bent. Among other things, I’m a feminist and I’m a writer, and recently I’ve been writing again, and experiencing a renewed awareness of how writing one word closes off possibilities for so many others (although I’ve been perusing sources, such as Octopus Magazine, that seem to resist these boundaries). At the same time my creative writing seems separate from what I try to do on my blog. In the past, both seemed to have nothing to do with my work or my personal life, which are themselves separate in my mind. Recently I’ve begun to talk occasionally about petitpoussin the person, which has come up in conversation in Real Life. Which prompts the questsions: In which sphere do I find my true self or my true voice? And doesn’t this imply that in some sense, in other areas, I am an imposter?

One of my favorite things to do is amble over and read Reginald Shepherd’s blog. He constantly articulates and refines his aesthetics, which is very comforting to me as a young writer. This recent post after Adorno struck me in light of my recent thoughts, particularly this passage:

Art preserves the possibility of liberation because its uselessness marks out a space not colonized by or valued by capital. Its “obsolescence” is also its resistance to being easily consumable; its loss of “relevance” is also a freedom to keep alive certain human possibilities.

It’s debatable if any art, even the much-neglected sphere of contemporary poetry, occupies any truly uncolonized space. Still, I appreciate Shepherd’s thoughts here because even if capital has (necessarily must have) an ‘interest’ in art, it’s interest in the purest financial sense — art as commodity. Just as progressives are concerned with labeling people to avoid learning them, so does capital limit art’s validity to its market value. Because art may and does exist in excess of its perceived ‘value’, it decenters commodity, if only for how long it takes to read or hear a poem.

If I speak of the whole as an understood norm or a desirable ideal, I sublimate the multiple messy and irreducible realities in question and relegate them to ‘parts’ of this ‘whole’. If I define art as Political-Capital-P, in some sense I paradoxically turn it into a commodity while undermining other possible readings which might posit political or ethical readings in less obvious, more illuminating ways. I limit my own production or reflection on art to one avenue in my intentions to the Whole (in this case, my system of political beliefs). If I deviate, I am once again an imposter. I will be discovered.

So I suppose this is my ode to deviation. And my big ‘fuck you’ to my True Self.