Overcoming Imposter Syndrome

How I Build Confidence as a Writer

As an American living in Seoul, I lead two lives: my life in English and my life in Korean. In my English-speaking life, I have a lot of confidence in my own abilities both as a writer and generally as a person. But in my Korean-speaking life, I feel like a complete and total fraud. 

Most of my imposter syndrome comes from my day job. I am a narrative designer for a video game developer in Seoul, and it absolutely makes no sense that a random Black woman like myself has this job. While I do speak Korean, I don’t have a high enough fluency to discuss complex topics like business models or game economics. More often than not, I only understand sixty percent of what’s being discussed in any given meeting. Even though I was recruited to write English-language content for the company, I still feel like a fraud for turning to my teamjang after each meeting to ask for the Sparknotes of what I couldn’t understand.

All this is to say that in one aspect of my life, I have very little imposter syndrome while in another I’m riddled with it. Since I live in Korea and work in a Korean-speaking office, there’s no way around using Korean, so I have to confront my insecurities head-on.

Today, I’m launching a series of posts on imposter syndrome and the strategies I use to overcome it in my Korean-speaking life. Each post will consist of three parts: (1) a strategy for tackling imposter syndrome, (2) ways to apply the strategy to your writing life, and (3) a writing exercise to help build your confidence.

Today, we’re discussing identity as a means to overcome imposter syndrome.

Identifying as a Learner

Growing up as a competitive swimmer helped me build the confidence to be a learner. I joined a club swim team when I was eleven years old. I had just learned how to swim the year before, and I was so slow that my teammates literally swam over me during practice. Every lap, they’d push me deeper and deeper into the water. I’d look up at the light-shimmered surface and see their pale feet nearly kicking me in the face.

Then, at eleven years old, I hated swimming because it made me hate myself, hate my own incompetence in the water. Every day after school, on our way to the pool, a BP gas station was the last thing I’d see before we’d turn into the parking lot. Each day as the BP station grew bigger on the horizon of that country road, so did the neutron weight of my self-loathing. For a year and a half, I begged my mother to let me quit, but she forced me to stick with it because she saw something I couldn’t then as an insecure middle schooler. She saw that this experience would make me comfortable with being uncomfortable. Even though I spent most of practice crying in my tinted goggles, she knew that I’d come out the other side of this okay with being quantifiably the worst at something, okay with failing for the sake of growth. Now, seventeen years later, I can confidently say that swimming taught me how to set aside my ego in order to learn.

In high school, I switched from swimming to diving.

Ever since those early swimming days, I have always identified as a learner, and it’s absolutely okay for a learner to not know everything or even be marginally good at anything. As a result, I never really experienced imposter syndrome until I moved to Korea.

My first visit to Gyeongbokgung in 2018

I first moved to Seoul in August 2018 on a Fulbright Creative Arts grant for my novel. I boarded my flight to Incheon nervous about my language skills yet vaguely confident that I could get by with what I knew. I had studied Korean over the course of four semesters in college, but when I landed in country, it had been four years since I had last used any Korean at all. My Fulbright program also did not have an orientation and only really assisted with our alien registration card application. Everything else from banking and setting up a phone to building a community we had to do entirely on our own.

After I completed my initial paperwork, I left the Fulbright office anxious but still truly believing Marie Forleo’s philosophy that everything was “figureoutable.” Despite my general confidence in myself as a problem solver, every single interaction I had in Korean was a disaster. No one could understand my terrible pronunciation, and I had no experience using, let alone understanding, Korean outside of an American classroom.

If you want to read more about my first year in Korea, check out this essay in Off Assignment

I went to bed every night, feeling like a complete and utter fraud. How did I con the US government into giving me this grant money? Surely someone else deserved it more. 

Despite all these difficulties, I still loved my experience in Korea, and I made plans to return as soon as I finished grad school.

Flashforward to 2022. After taking two advanced Korean classes at The Korea Society and completing over 500 hours of one-on-one tutoring, I’m able to move through my life in Seoul comfortably speaking Korean and problem solving in my second language. In April, I had a week of vacation before I started my job at the video game company. That week I got new glasses, signed a lease for my apartment, and completed a complicated bank transaction without using any English—all things I never imagined I’d be able to accomplish four years ago.

And so, I went into my new job at a Korean-speaking office, chuffed about my progress and confident in the skills I had gained. But on my first day, as an HR rep rapidly explained the details of my health insurance in my second language, all of my confidence evaporated. I was eleven years old again, getting run over by every single one of my teammates because I was the slowest, the most incompetent, just quantifiably the worst.

Even though I was overwhelmed by having to work in my second language, I could still tell on day one that I was going to love this job. So, I knew I needed to change my mindset and take a stand against my imposter syndrome to make this work.

The first thing I did was outline the context of my Korean language journey in my journal. Here’s a timeline of how I learned Korean:

• 2008: Learned Hangul and every curse word from my Korean roommate in boarding school

• 2012-2014: Took four Korean courses in college

• 2018-2019: Lived in Seoul on a Fulbright Arts grant, did private tutoring

• 2020-2021: Completed 2 advanced courses at The Korea Society and 500 hours of one-on-one tutoring

• 2021-present: Living and working in Korea

While it may look like I’ve been studying Korean for ten years, I didn’t use it at all from 2014 to 2018, and I essentially forgot everything except the very basics. Is it reasonable to expect myself to have corporate-level fluency after studying Korean inconsistently for ten years? No, absolutely not. Once I put my learning journey in context, my imposter syndrome relaxed because I could concretely see that my expectations were unrealistic. It’s important for us to set high expectations for ourselves in order to achieve our goals, but all of our expectations must be grounded in the reality of our lives.

If you’re feeling imposter syndrome in your writing life, try the 15-minute journaling exercise below. Actually sit down and write out your answers to each question. If you just answer the questions in your head, it’s easy for your ego and self-doubt to dismiss the reality of your circumstances. When you physically write out the answers, you can see the context of your writing life more objectively than you can in your head.

Writing Exercise

Instructions

Write by hand (if you can!) and set a timer for each question. Free write your answer in your journal and be honest. No one will see this but you. When the timer goes off, finish your thought and move on to the next question.

Guiding Questions

1. How do you feel about your writing right now? (1 minute)

2. What project are you working on? What are your concrete goals for this project? (1 minute)

3. When did you start this project? How long have you been working on this project? (1 minute)

4. On average, how many hours a day do you work on this project? (1 minute)

5. On average, how many hours a week do you work on this project? (1 minute)

6. When do you want to finish this project? (1 minute)

7. To meet that deadline, how many words/pages do you have to write/revise each month? (2 minutes)

8. How many words/pages do you have to write/revise each week? (2 minutes)

9. Given how much time you’ve been spending on this project, are your goals and expectations realistic? Why or why not? (2 minutes)

10. What changes do you need to make to your goals or writing habits to make your expectations realistic? (3 minutes)

While it’s important to identify as a learner and put your journey in context, it’s also important to remember that the only true cure for imposter syndrome is sitting down and doing the work. The writing exercises at the end of these posts are all geared toward getting you back into your work.

Try out the exercise and let me know how it goes in the comments.

Also, happy New Year! I have a lot of exciting things coming up, and I look forward to sharing them with you soon. In terms of goals for 2023, my main goal is to send my novel, You Will Survive This, to my agent by January 9th and (hopefully!) go on sub by the fall.

What are your writing goals for this year? Any New Year’s resolutions you're excited about? Tell me everything in the comments below.

Until next week,

Kat