I understand impostor syndrome. It was still an alien concept to me. I feel for the people who have experienced it, who continue to struggle with the feeling that they somehow fooled everyone into believing they deserve to be where they are. That is a heavy thing to carry, especially after everything it took to get there.
I never had it.
Fear? I knew it as a kid. People planted plenty of it in me. But I was always a fighter, and my righteous rage was stronger. I could see the bullshit, and it made me angry enough to push back. Learning to feel safe took years. Knowing I deserved better was never the problem.
I had been in too many spaces, watched too closely how people were judged, to believe that everyone who made it inside had earned their place through some magnificent display of merit. Merit was hardly it. I knew the gaslighting. I knew how people could insist on one thing while rewarding its opposite. And I had learned to read people long before anybody was interested in reading my résumé.
I have been in those rooms. With people outside our communities, with our own leadership, with the favorites they keep recommending to one another. I have listened. I have watched them work. I am not that impressed with many of them. Certainly not enough to let their titles convince me that I am the one who wandered in by mistake.
I had learned to read people because I had to. To survive.
I learned to read the room before I was invited into one
Before New York, there was home. I have written about my grandmother Nigela and about my grandfather Ricardo in an excerpt published by Dominican Writers. In Sosúa, I grew up among adults and young men whose moods could set the terms of my day. I was a child. I still had to figure them out.
My grandmother fed the Haitian workers next door without expecting anything in return. An uncle saved me from drowning. There was care. There was also cruelty. I can honor the people who protected me without pretending nothing hurt. Loving my family did not require forgetting my childhood.
Then came New York and another education. In an essay for OkayAfrica, I wrote about learning its racial rules. My bilingual classmates and I faced harassment and violence for being foreign, for speaking Spanish, for being different. We changed how we dressed and how we spoke because our safety was at stake. We learned which differences would make us targets and which associations might protect us.
The hierarchies were also operating among people who were themselves marginalized. Sharing a neighborhood, experiencing discrimination, even looking like one another did not automatically make us safe with each other. I had to pay attention to that, too.
Perhaps being that hypervigilant gave me an edge later. I had learned to notice who could get away with what, who had to adjust, whose acceptance came with conditions. The consequences of misreading people had been real. I carried that awareness with me into other spaces. I watch people with power closely, whether they have earned it or not. Especially when they insist they have.
A child should not have to study other people’s prejudices just to get through the day.
But those lessons made the later sales pitch difficult to swallow: that everybody was assessed fairly, that the best people rose to the top, that if you worked hard enough and behaved well enough, your work would speak for itself.
Speak to whom? Who was listening? Who had already decided what they were willing to hear?
The judgment often arrived before the evidence
In an essay for NBC Latino, I wrote about being stopped and frisked while waiting for a train in Queens. I was a college student with a book bag. I had thought of myself as a kind, respectful person. None of that prevented two officers from putting me against a wall and searching me in front of everyone.
When I finally asked them to look at my college ID, their response changed. One apologized. I remember the humiliation, the tear, the people looking. An apology could not make that disappear.
They had assigned me a character before they knew anything about me. A credential suddenly made the same person more deserving of consideration.
Somebody could make me afraid, humiliate me, hold power over me, without becoming a reliable authority on who I was.
I have challenged academia’s treatment of us in HuffPost. Academia was supposed to know better. All those books. All that research. All that knowledge about human behavior. Surely the people teaching us to examine the world could manage a little examination of themselves.
In my video, “Understanding Sofia Vergara: Accents, Access, and Positionalities,” I spoke about an advanced anthropology class at Queens College, where I was doing better than my classmates and answering in my own words. My professor seated me at the front during a test to observe my answers. It unsettled me. My grades went down afterward.
What seemed so difficult to believe? That an immigrant kid with an Afro, dressed in urban clothing, could understand these concepts better than privileged natives? That was how I read his disbelief. The work I was doing and the person he seemed prepared to see were not lining up. His disbelief was getting into my head while I was trying to do the work.
It affected me. Of course it did. The man had power over my grades. I was trying to learn while also having to navigate his reaction to my learning. Imagine that. Understanding the material was no longer enough; now I had to deal with the suspicion that I understood it too well.
But I could feel his power and still question his judgment. That grade could affect my life. It could not retroactively remove the concepts I had already understood.
Then we are supposed to look at a grade as though it arrived from heaven, untouched by the person holding the pen.
I described ghostwriting a script with film-school graduates for a Hollywood producer. His assistant had passed me over after seeing my name and hearing me speak. The producer saw something else. Later, he asked the group what they thought of people with accents. Most thought they were not smart. Some said they were stupid.
I was right there. With an accent. Working on the script with them.
Was I supposed to hear that and question my intelligence? I was questioning theirs. They had turned an accent into an intelligence test and were failing it out loud.
These were the people whose assessment I was supposed to take seriously? The problem was sitting there, announcing its prejudice as though it were an observation.
I have been passed over despite recommendations and experience. I knew what I brought. I could see that knowing it and having somebody in power reward it were two very different things.
So why would I enter another space and automatically assume that everybody there had passed some rigorous, impartial test that I alone had somehow evaded? I had been watching the selection. I challenged the meritocracy myth in Fox News Latino back in 2014.
You cannot keep showing me how the trick works and then demand that I applaud the magic.
We are told we have to be twice as good. Sometimes it feels like thrice: thrice as brilliant, thrice as skilled, thrice as confident, just to get the consideration somebody else receives before opening their mouth. And after all that, we may still be called arrogant for knowing what we bring.
But let us be honest about something else. Some of our own get through while being as mediocre as the people who admitted them. They have learned the cadence, the vocabulary, the appropriate silences. They know whose ideas to repeat and whose displeasure to avoid. A parrot can learn the script. That does not make it the author.
Then we find ourselves in this tremendously difficult position as a community: depending on intermediaries who are supposed to speak for us while they help keep us out. Our experiences become their talking points. Our exclusion becomes the problem they are paid to discuss. Yet when we arrive with our own voices, our own work, our own demands, suddenly we need to be more patient, more polished, more strategic. More like them, apparently. That audition never seems to end.
I am not entirely convinced of their brilliance either. A title tells me what somebody has been appointed to do. A recommendation tells me who recommended them. Neither does the work for them. I want to see the work. I want to see what happens when somebody challenges them. I want to know whether their commitment to community survives a disagreement with a person who has less power.
Sometimes I wonder whether a little doubt might be useful to the people whose performance gives the rest of us so much reason for it. But experiencing impostor syndrome is no measure of mediocrity. Plenty of brilliant, talented people have it. Plenty of thoroughly unimpressive people move through the world without a moment of hesitation. Confidence alone proves very little. So does a corner office.
Some of our own “established people” have told me to develop relationships with those in power. That it takes years. Years of cultivating, of being patient, of making the right impression. But when those people look at me, at people like us, with contempt, what kind of inroads are we making? How many years am I supposed to dedicate to convincing somebody that I am worth treating like a human being?
And why is that always my assignment? Where is the advice for the person looking down on us? Who is pulling them aside to explain that their contempt is the problem? Apparently, my patience needs professional development. Their prejudice is fully qualified.
We need to assess ourselves and be for real about the advice we give. A relationship can open a door. It can also teach you how much of yourself somebody expects you to leave outside it. What are we asking people to tolerate, and who benefits from their tolerating it? We cannot keep prescribing years of accommodation and call it wanting the best for all of us.
Sometimes I wonder what becomes of our people once they make it. Then I hear them repeating the very things that kept the rest of us out, and I remember: I have written about how being palatable to a bigger oppressor gets mistaken for merit. Perhaps sounding like them was part of the qualification. Perhaps the transformation we are watching is the job description being fulfilled.
So before we congratulate ourselves on who got into the room, let us listen to what they are saying once they get there. If the advice coming back is that the rest of us should learn to endure the contempt, what, exactly, has changed?
We have to reckon with this among ourselves. Privilege, titles, proximity, the right person making the introduction: I have watched those things pass for proof of ability while actual ability waited outside. I am tired of the image being sold as the substance. If we recreate the same arrangements with familiar faces, we are teaching the next generation the same lesson under new management.
Audre Lorde wrote, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Her argument confronted the exclusions reproduced inside a movement claiming liberation. That deserves to be read in full. And I still want to argue with that “never.” Who says we cannot take the platforms, the resources, the access hoarded by those in power and turn them toward undoing the arrangements that protect them?
A platform can carry the people it once shut out. A budget can pay the people whose work was taken for granted. Access can be used to bring others through instead of making them plead at the door. But if all we do is inherit the contempt, the favoritism, the appetite for control, we have changed nothing worth celebrating. Use the access. Refuse the allegiance. And let the people we claim to serve judge what we have done with it.
Please, spare me the sermon
And professionalism? I am tired of that word being brought out as though it settles the conversation.
Tell me whether the work is good. Whether people are treated fairly. Whether somebody takes responsibility when they cause harm. Whether the standards apply to the person setting them. Those are things we can examine. I am interested in the answers.
I am considerably less impressed by somebody’s ability to sound measured while delivering an insult, or to make an exclusion seem reasonable because they have learned the appropriate vocabulary. You can discriminate in a pleasant voice. You can exploit somebody without ever raising it.
A beautifully worded email can still be a nasty piece of work. We know this. Some of us have entire inboxes.
The presentation, tone, respectability, and perceived safeness expected of us deserve scrutiny. What, exactly, are we being asked to make people comfortable with? Our work? Our presence? Or their ability to keep treating us the same way without hearing about it?
Give me criticism I can use. Tell me where the argument fails, where the evidence is insufficient, where I could do the work better. I can learn from that. But when the standard changes depending on who is being evaluated, I am going to notice. Calling that standard professional will not keep me from questioning it.
And I refuse to pretend that the people running things have earned unquestionable authority simply because they are running things. Look at this country. Look at who gets entrusted with our lives. I see enough inept clowns in power to last several lifetimes, and somehow the rest of us are supposed to agonize over whether we belong.
Their incompetence gets an office. Our competence gets an interrogation.
And we are the ones supposed to feel like frauds?
Knowing your worth still comes at a price
And yes, I can be furious about all of this and feel deeply for the person who has internalized those judgments. I know how relentless the messages are. They follow us through classrooms, workplaces, institutions, our own communities. Sometimes they come from people we love, people we hoped would understand, people whose approval carries years of meaning.
I feel for you. Truly. You do not need me joining the chorus of people telling you to toughen up after they have helped wear you down.
What I want is for you to have room to examine the people and the standards that helped convince you to doubt yourself. The grade that never came. The promotion. The recognition. Who decided? What were they measuring? Did everyone have to clear the same hurdle? Your disappointment deserves more than a quick conclusion that you were inadequate.
You may have been denied the grade, the promotion, the recognition. That does not give the people withholding them ownership of your brilliance.
Knowing this does not pay the bills. In 2021, I wrote about losing paid work because of my radical writing, and about having a family to support. Understanding the arrangement did not spare me its consequences. I could know my worth and still need the money. I could see what was happening and still be hurt by it.
That is why I have little patience for advice that ends at fixing our attitude. The people controlling opportunities still have responsibilities. A worker’s confidence cannot substitute for fair pay. A student’s self-belief cannot excuse an unjust evaluation. Telling somebody to recognize their brilliance is only part of what we owe them. We also need to stop participating in the practices that keep it from being recognized, supported, and allowed to grow.
Let them keep it
I know what it is to be celebrated one week and treated as an incendiary nuisance the next. The work does not suddenly lose its value because the person who applauded it yesterday has found themselves implicated in it today. I pay attention to that, too.
But I want something more for the people coming after us. For our youth. For my son.
In an Instagram post about walking outside with my son, I described the two of us as “A ninja and a theater kid.” Me, hypervigilant. Him, free-spirited in the safe space I had worked to create. I could be tender with him and still be watching for anybody who might try us.
I think about how fearful I was, how much of that fear other people planted in me, and how I understood that no one was coming to save me. I had to read faces. I had to pay attention. My safety could depend on it.
Knowing what I know now has not made every trace of that fear disappear. Getting my nervous system to settle has taken work, and it still does. But the fight was always there. So was the anger at being treated that way. I could recognize the hierarchy, see the prejudice, understand the gaslighting, and push back even while my body was bracing for the consequences.
That is what I mean when I say I never had impostor syndrome. I knew I had something to offer, and I had seen too much of the people judging me to confuse their approval with proof of my ability. Their power could make my life harder. It could not make their judgment infallible.
I want my son to be himself without having to become an expert in everybody else’s bullshit first. I want that for our youth, too. They deserve room to learn, to be brilliant, to make mistakes, to grow, without somebody interpreting every difference as a defect and every display of confidence as an offense.
That requires something from us. From the people grading them, hiring them, teaching them, raising them. From those of us who have been hurt and can still turn around and hurt somebody else. We cannot keep planting the fear and then congratulate ourselves for teaching children how to survive it.
Own your brilliance. When you recognize it in somebody else, give it room. Credit their work. Support it. Pay for it. And when a young person comes to you with the confidence you spent years trying to build, take care with what you do next.
Let them keep it.
And may we get to reclaim some of that freedom ourselves. As I wrote in that post: “Who said warriors can’t be gardeners. Not me.”
Now go out there with an extra spring in your step and the confidence of knowing you are brilliant. You don’t need anybody’s permission to know your worth.
Impostor syndrome may be Machiavellian. Imposing. Insistent. Persistent. But you are smarter and more resilient. You’ve seen incompetence project its shortcomings onto brilliance and call it judgment. Let the truly mediocre reckon with their own reflection. You don’t have to carry their projection.
All those people in those rooms? Plenty of them are winging it, too. They just get to call it leadership. If you have to practice walking in like you belong, practice. Keep at it until that confidence feels like your own. You’re allowed to be a work in progress and still take up space.
Your brilliance belongs here. You belong here. And “here” is wherever your heart and desires take you. If your brilliance isn’t respected and honored there, keep going. Keep knocking and opening doors. You’ll find the room. And if that room doesn’t exist, let’s create it, with space for every part of you: what’s ready and what’s still coming through.
And when the haters, real or imagined, the ones you’ve carried since childhood and those who have followed you this far, tell you otherwise, channel Saruman speaking through Théoden, for even the villains can teach us to laugh in the face of fear. Look them in the eye and tell them: “You have no power here.”