I Feel Like A Fake

This announcement got my mental juices churning:

The American Adoption Congress will host its 41^stAnnual International Conference April 15-18 in San Diego, CA.  This year’s theme is “Charting a Course for the Future of Adoption”. The AAC motto is: Educating, Empowering, Evolving. The final session of the conference will feature a session by Erica Babino, a professional mediator, who will speak about “Adoptees and the Imposter Syndrome”. 

What is Imposter Syndrome, and how does it impact adoptees?

I went to Wikipedia and discovered that Imposter Syndrome is also called impostor phenomenon, impostorism, fraud syndrome or the impostor experience.It is defined as:

“a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their accomplishments and has a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a “fraud”.^[1] Despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are frauds, and do not deserve all they have achieved. Individuals with impostorism incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or as a result of deceiving others into thinking they are more intelligent than they perceive themselves to be.” 

It never fails. I get lost in the threads of Wikipedia.  I read on: imposters express feelings of anxiety, stress, or depression. Thoughts such as:”I must not fail”;”I feel like a fake”; and, “I just got lucky” accompany the experience. Early research showed that women profoundly identified with this phenomenon, yet follow-up studies proved it showed up in men as well.

All this got me asking questions to the middle-aged woman in the mirror.  As both a female and an adoptee, have I ever felt like an imposter?  Have there been moments in my life where I was conscious of saying to myself: “I must not fail. I feel like a fake. I just got lucky.”

Yes. Yes. And, yes again.

Think about this. If you are adopted, the identity with which you are currently using was not your first personae. One could consider it an alias, a fake or assumed name presumably selected by a well-meaning adult.  The point is that adoptees are not the people they started off to be when the sperm hit the egg.  After labor and delivery, we became someone else.  We ceased being our birth parents’ problem and became our adoptive parents’ pride and joy.

Adoptees are quite aware that the life we were genetically meant to have is not the one we are living. (Whether the life an adoptee leads is the one they were meant to have is not the scope of this blog post.) Being an adoptee is an existence of duality. An assumed identity replaces the original one on the certified birth record.  The redacted birth record becomes the new passport for a lifetime.

Besides the name change, how else might an adoptee feel like an imposter?

Let me give you an example from my life.  Chicago is made up of ethnic neighborhoods: Polish, Irish, Italian, Greek, and so on. My adoptive father was an Irish Catholic and so was my adoptive mom. With no known heritage of my own, I assumed that of my adoptive parents. Thrust into Chicago’s Irish culture, my sister and I were indoctrinated into festivals and customs.  We attended St. Patty’s Day parades, listened to Irish music, laughed at Irish jokes and memorized its folklore.

With my dark hair, freckly fair skin and greenish eyes, I passed easily for an Irish lass.  As a high schooler, I entered the St. Patty’s Day Queen contest. Honored to be a member of the court, I rode atop a convertible and finessed my ‘queen wave’. In college, I represented the city of Chicago at the Rose of Tralee festival in Ireland.  Proud to look Irish and be recognized as such, inwardly I doubted.  I doubted and I doubted. Was the blood in my veins really Gaelic, or was I an imposter, a fake, a liar? Had I cheated a true Irish lass out of her due honor?  Can you imagine my relief when DNA analysis showed that I was nearly 50% Scotch Irish?  For nearly forty years, adoptee imposter syndrome colored the way I felt about myself. Learning the truth about my heritage healed my inner doubts.

Wikipedia goes on to say:

“The feeling of being a fraud that is emphasized in the impostor phenomenon is not uncommon. It has been estimated that nearly 70 percent of individuals will experience signs and symptoms of impostor phenomenon at least once in their life.^[14] This can be a result of a new setting, academic or professional.”

Nowhere on the Wiki threads is imposter syndrome linked to adoption and adoptees, which is why I was heartened to see “Adoptee & Imposter Syndrome” on the AAC conference line-up.  Somehow, seeing the two linked in print puts a label to those days when I feared failure, felt like a fake, or blamed my success on being lucky.  Knowledge is king.

If you are an adoptee, birthparent or adoptive parent, please share your thoughts or experiences regarding imposter syndrome. The more we consider, acknowledge, and share our viewpoints, the better off we are as individuals and as a society.

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