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OtherArt of Family Medicine

The impostor in all of us

Yuebo Yang
Canadian Family Physician October 2020, 66 (10) 758;
Yuebo Yang
Fourth-year medical student in the MD undergraduate program at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
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Figure1

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

Alas

It is a struggle many of us face

We are all impostors

Footnotes

  • Competing interests

    None declared

  • Copyright© the College of Family Physicians of Canada
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Canadian Family Physician: 66 (10)
Canadian Family Physician
Vol. 66, Issue 10
1 Oct 2020
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The impostor in all of us
Yuebo Yang
Canadian Family Physician Oct 2020, 66 (10) 758;

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