The impostor in all of us

Yuebo Yang

Impostor syndrome in medicine has been widely written about in academic journals and is prevalent in the profession. I wanted to poeticize this concept from a physician’s perspective.

This poem is organized into 3 stanzas: my, our, and they. The first stanza, my, orients the reader to the medical profession using metaphors, while the second, our, transitions to the internal conflict within the writer, a product of impostor syndrome. They ends the poem with the blunt realization that a misrepresentation of the achievements of colleagues perpetuates impostor syndrome. Ultimately, we are all equal in our goal to provide the best care possible.

Impostor syndrome

White streams of sapience flow from my shoulders to
knees
Extensions of ears which hearken to the soul hang from
my neck
Gilded framed pride
Stacked bounded scripts
10 000 hours
It is all a facade to him

He has been my kryptonite since birth
Subconscious insecurities
And boundless unfiltered judgement
We are Apollo and Hades
Yet our intertwined flaws run deeper than our crimson river

Our colleagues always surround and support us
Yet they still seem so distantly high above
Our ambitions and goals, a moving target in perpetuity
Our desires overshadow the vision
Of these communal feelings amongst us all
And of the symmetry of this rigid crystal lattice around us