Notes From Memorial Glade

As I sit on Memorial Glade, I’m hit with the realization that I’m approaching the end of my time here at UC Berkeley. I can’t help but reflect on things I wish I’d done differently. I was reading about Einstein the other day, and came to learn that, near the end of his life — even when his name became synonymous with “extraordinary genius” — he struggled with what we now call impostor syndrome. Confiding in a friend, he reportedly said:

“The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”

It’s almost preposterous to think about: the man who literally rewrote the laws of space and time, won a Nobel prize for helping kick off the quantum revolution¹, and gave us the most famous mathematical equation in history, privately felt like a con-artist.

I thought I could combat my own impostor syndrome by simply doing more. I thought, this is a temporary feeling that I’ll chisel down with each new achievement. I’ll feel it less with each rung of the ladder, with each new thing I learn, I’ll feel less and less like a fraud. Maybe there’s a shred of truth to this. In the sense that maybe there exists a certain quantity of work and learning that would reduce the intensity of this feeling, while never defeating it in its entirety — as so perfectly exemplified by Einstein.

But maybe this is simply the wrong way to look at it. I love learning, and I love the kind of work I get to do, but chasing an opaque goal of “complete some $X$ amount of work” in order to achieve some grounded level of confidence feels like fighting an uphill battle on the wrong front. Maybe what I should demand from myself is not solely to accomplish more in order to give myself permission to feel confident — but to afford myself more grace, and to accept the humanness of insecurity, instead of so viciously trying to fight it off through brute force.

This brings me back to my reflections on my time here at Berkeley. I’ve come to realize just how poisonous this feeling has been for me, and in addition, its coupling and amplification of my social anxieties. They feed into and off of each other: you’re anxious to go out and meet likeminded people because you’re worried you might say something silly and then everyone will spot that you’re a fraud — and you feel it yourself too, so you’re nervous to go out and meet people because you already know how it’ll go anyways. You’ll feel out of place, too nervous to interrupt a conversation to introduce yourself and make a friend, and the fear of having to do this will keep you from going to that event that excited you when you first saw the flyer. This has caused me to live my time here at Berkeley much lonelier than I would’ve liked.

I have met some amazing people here, particularly this semester, and I am extremely grateful for them; their kindness and friendship have helped me grow a lot as a person. But it took an extraordinary amount of effort to overcome these things, and I’ve only just now begun seriously working on it. I wish I’d started this work earlier.

When I sat down, opened my journal, and started writing this, I didn’t have a particular thesis in mind. But if you take anything away from this piece, let it be this:

Einstein wasn’t a fraud, but he still felt like one. Keep this in mind the next time you’re caught in this feeling yourself. Don’t wait to give yourself permission to be seen and heard by others. We’re all just trying to figure it out, and we can do it together instead of on our own.