By Emily Xia

I have a confession.

I’m not the person everyone seems to think I am. I’m not effortlessly smart or social, and I’m definitely not always calm and on top of everything.

And this isn’t me trying to be obnoxiously humble — this is genuinely how I perceive myself on a day-to-day basis. Ever since I can remember, in my mind, every award I’ve received and accomplishment I’ve worked for has been undeserved. They served only as a reminder of the standards I pressure myself to uphold.

As a young child, I received high grades and test scores, and suddenly, because society seems to have such an obsession with labels, I was categorized as “smart” and a “good student.” As proud as I was to have that title, once I was given it, I treated it as something that could be stripped away at any moment.

My parents and teachers only seemed to perpetuate my mindset. Every year at parent teacher conferences, my teachers would rave about how good of a student I was, and my parents would be so proud of me. They’d come home telling me how happy they were to have a child like me, and how I should keep up the work I was doing.

And I know it sounds weird to complain about teachers and parents believing in me, but honestly, the praise was just confirmation that my efforts in maintaining my image were paying off.

Now, if I had been given other labels, this wouldn’t have been so devastating to my self-image, but since then, I’ve only really been known for being smart. Not particularly funny, athletic or social. Even today, I feel that the only constant in my life is that I’m supposed to be smart, because I’ve been able to maintain that label thus far.

For the longest time, I thought that the only thing I had going for me was my intelligence. If I lost that, I’d lose my identity. I’d lose any ounce of uniqueness I had within me – any ounce of respect I had from peers.

I convinced myself to live a different life outside of home – or at least, that’s what I thought. I thought that at school, everyone saw the high test scores, the challenging classes and rewarding extracurriculars when on the inside, I secretly had no clue what I was doing.

One day during the second semester of junior year, I was sitting in my HamLit classroom when the class somehow landed on the topic of imposter syndrome.

“It’s when you believe that everything you’ve achieved wasn’t deserved, and you feel like you have to constantly maintain a better version of yourself to the public.”

As soon as the words came out of Ms. Nava’s mouth, it was like I was hearing the answer to a question I had been bottling up inside of me for 16 years. Even though it didn’t cure my mindset, I finally had a term to express how I’d been living my life. And best of all, it meant that what I had been secretly hiding was common enough for it to have a name.

I’m not gonna lie: I still fall back into the monstrous jaws of imposter syndrome all the time. But now that I know that I’m not the only one experiencing it, I’ve realized that this whole time, nobody stopped believing in me as I had feared, even when I was at my worst. I was always the one that lost faith in myself first.

And I don’t want you to think that I’m complaining about being labeled as smart or hardworking; on the contrary, those are attributes that I’ve always been proud of. I just wish that when I was in early high school, middle school or even elementary school, somebody would have taken the time to sit down with me, look me in the eyes, and instead of telling me how smart I was, tell me that I deserved everything I had worked for.

So I guess I’m trying to be that person for you, because guess what? You’re capable and doing just fine. Your identity belongs solely to you, and no one has the power to change that for you.

With that, I think I need to revise my confession from earlier.

I’m not the person everybody seems to think I am. I’m not effortlessly smart or social, and I’m definitely not always calm and on top of it. But everything I do is a product of my own hard work, and the pride I feel from that transcends labels.

While I used to think I was an imposter, I’m actually just chaotic, bubbly, distracted, weird and quirky on the regular.

In other words, I’m just being me.