Yesterday I walked briskly on Boston’s uneven brick streets up to the State House, a gold-domed building that characterizes the Boston skyline. I was dressed in chic black with hose and heels. It was a gorgeous day and I walked confidently, as someone secure and whole. There was a time when the clothes were the only thing confident about me – I thought if I looked the part, maybe people wouldn’t see behind the façade, learn the truth about who I was – a woman trying hard to fit, to belong, to not feel like an impostor. So yesterday my feelings of confidence and security were all the more precious for they came with a price.
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I went to boarding school at age six. When I was in 3rd grade a teacher asked me to stay after school. Being asked to stay after school rarely meant something good, usually it meant you were in some sort of trouble.
She waited until all the other children had left and then asked me to come to her desk. “You’ve been sick a lot” she said. Then she paused. “We all know you’re faking so you need to stop being sick”.
My little 8 year-old heart stopped for a minute. Confusion and embarrassment flooded over my heart and face. Wait. What?
There was no “Can you tell me about how you feel? What you feel like when you’re sick? Are you homesick? Do you miss your mom and dad? Do you miss your cat and rabbits?” No – none of that basic work with a child and figure out what’s really going on stuff. It was blunt and to the point and it worked. “You’re sick, you’re faking, you need to stop.” That’s it. Case closed.
When you’re 8 years old and you’re in boarding school there aren’t many places to be alone. You room with six other little girls who are also far away from homes and mamas. You share meals with 60 to 100 other people in a large dining hall where bells signal the start and end to meals. You have devotions nightly with 20 pajama-clad girls, faces more or less washed and teeth sort of brushed. It is community living at its deepest, sometimes finest and sometimes worst, and most don’t experience community living that early in life.
And at 8, you don’t talk about coping or coping skills. You just go along with what happens. You’re not unhappy, in fact often you’re very happy. But after a couple of months it all gets…well, a bit much. In my case I started out sick. I was truly sick with a fever and more. But yes, after realizing that being sick meant getting individual attention, getting sick meant being alone, getting sick meant special meals brought to you from the nurses infirmary– well then I thought it was something I wanted a bit more of.
So there you have it.
As is want to happen, some things make their way into the psyche and they stay there and rot. They become damaging. That is what happened with this interaction.
I was dismissed soon after and went up to the hostel, a short walk up stairs and across walkways on a slight incline. My loyal friends were waiting for me.
“What happened?”
“Why did you have to stay”
“Are you in trouble?”
These were familiar words with boarding school kids. We functioned as a large, extended family and breaking rules or pushing margins was part of that. This time the words caught in my throat “She thinks I’m faking”.
As I said it, the scarlet letter ‘I’ for impostor was branded hot on my soul.
I Was an Impostor. I Was Fake.
The damage went deep.
Along with that came the natural chameleocity that happens with the child raised between worlds. You know you are not of one world, or the other; rather you share a culture between. So when you’re in the one world, for me Pakistan – you learn some Urdu, you embrace many things, you love so much of the culture, but you stand out. You are not Pakistani.
Then there was this other world called the United States. And the blue passport bearing my picture and various stamps told me, told the world, that I belonged there; told them I was a citizen. The problem was that I never felt like I belonged in this other world. At any time I was less or more comfortable, but I always felt a bit of a fake. I didn’t know how to buy clothes. I didn’t know how to dress for winter. I didn’t know some of the idioms, the slang that was so important at that age. I had no clue about pop culture. I was someone trying to fake it, trying to fit but at heart an impostor.
So the scarlet letter continued to haunt me.
Whenever I experienced success or received an award there was, deep down, a sense that I did not deserve it, that someone would find out who I really was and the award, the success would be taken from me.
And then there was faith. I had been raised in a Christian boarding school where faith was applauded. It was non-denominational so from an early age we watched our parents and house parents work hard to break down barriers based on theological differences beyond the Gospel essentials. I learned early in life that there were times when you had to ‘agree to disagree‘ but that it didn’t have to ruin friendships, rather you could focus on commonalities. Translating that experience to the western church felt difficult, I felt that ‘sides’ were encouraged and if you didn’t have a ‘side’ then you were a chameleon, wishy-washy.
The word came up again: an impostor. I was an impostor.
It was a few years ago through some soul-searching that I realized the damage inflicted from my internalizing the words “We know you’re faking”. No matter how successful I was, it would always come back to this: I was a fake. I was an Impostor.
And someone would find out.
How are childhood word wounds removed? How is the tape rewound, erased, new words spoken and a new script written that will move a third culture kid, or any child, forward. A script that will erase the scarlet letter from your heart and soul, replacing it with the seal of belonging?
I believe the first step is honesty and confession that we got hurt, that there was sometimes damage from the unsuspecting and well-meaning.
Tomorrow I’ll take you into that first step of healing in a new post: On Being an Impostor- Erasing the Scarlet Letter.
How about you? What word wounds were branded on your soul and how have you erased those? This is a hard topic and I don’t expect any of us to bear all in a blog post, but in your own space can you be honest and write down those words so that they can be erased and a new script written?
