A story I wrote on impostor syndrome amongst game developers went live several hours ago. You should read it. It's one of the more important pieces I've done.
It was a hard story to write, though. One of the hardest I've done in my five years as a writer and journalist. The problem was that the things I was hearing from my interview subjects rang true. They hit me too close to home. I was nodding my head not in empathy but in agreement, like, yeah, I know exactly what you're saying.
Self-doubt goes part and parcel with the writing business. We seclude ourselves from the world as a matter of professional practice. We lock ourselves in rooms and stare at a blank page. We have weird idiosyncratic processes that we go through as we wait for the words to pour out — as though we are mere vessels for language to flow through and not the skilled craftsmen that we really are.
The worst of it is that we all know that most everyone can write, but only a special few can write well. That naturally leaves you wondering: am I actually one of the special ones? Or did I just get lucky with [insert best thing you've written] and my incompetence has yet to catch up with me?
For me, impostor syndrome strikes not so much at my writing but rather more at my journalism. I've had it drilled into me since I was six years old that I am a good writer. I was praised by every teacher and all my peers. I won junior writing awards. I got A's on essays without really trying. I got the senior writing prize at my high school, awarded ahead of the girl who won the Australasian Schools Writing Competition (a two hour yearly contest that I entered just once, in my final year, and placed in the top 1%). I've had incredibly positive feedback on many of my professional articles — particularly the features at Ars Technica and Polygon. So of course I can write well. That's too many people telling me I'm talented to doubt it for more than a moment.
But it's a very different story as a journalist. I resisted the label for years. Journalism is what people do at The New York Times and The Guardian, I told myself. I just write about people who make games, and about the people who play them. I'm just a writer. And maybe a games historian as well. Others called me a journalist, and praised my work as good journalism. I tried to ignore them. They made me feel bad. They made me feel like a fraud.
Then I went back to school. I already had a double bachelors (majors in history and computer science). This time I was going to get real journalism training. I enrolled in a masters degree at the start of 2014. It was great, and I learnt a lot over the following year and a half. But it didn't change much about how I felt about myself. I still feel uncomfortable when people call me a journalist. I still just write about the people behind games, and occasionally about exciting things emerging in science and technology.
I try to combat it the same way that I always have. By overcompensating. The only way I can deal with the "journalist" label is by pushing to do the best, most original reporting in the games space. To do the stories that nobody else is doing. To show why game accessibility is important or to put a spotlight on emerging games industries, or to show the incredible, endless creativity of the games community. I must constantly prove to myself that I'm not a fraud in order to feel confident.
Just a pretend one. As silly as that sounds.
This is why this impostor syndrome article was so hard for me to write. I was getting reminded of my own impostor syndrome every step of the way. The usual self-doubts and anxieties that come with writing a reported piece were magnified. What if I forget to include something important about the condition? Worse, what if I don't even know about this important thing? Then they'll see I'm not a Proper Journalist.
Normally if I feel this way, I just hunker down and keep working and it goes away. I soon realise it's silly talk. Not this time. I had my worst ever case of impostor syndrome while writing about people who suffer from impostor syndrome. Only the irony of that kept me going to the end.
