I don't feel real: imposter syndrome and living as an observer

I do not feel real#

I am going to say it plainly, because I have spent a long time dressing it up.

I do not feel real.

Not all the time, and not in a way that stops me functioning. I get up. I work. I answer messages. I laugh in the right places. But behind all of that there is a quiet, constant sense that I am not actually in it. I am watching it. Somebody who looks like me is doing the day, and I am sitting a few feet behind him with the lights off, taking notes.

I have felt this for as long as I can remember. It is not a phase and it is not a bad week. It is the background of my life.

Imposter syndrome, but bigger#

Most people know imposter syndrome as the work version. You get the job, the promotion, the compliment, and a voice says: they are going to find out. You are not as good as they think. You just got lucky and fooled everyone.

Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes named it back in 1978 as the "imposter phenomenon": a persistent belief that your success is undeserved, plus a fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite real evidence of competence.

I know that one. I know it very well. But mine never stayed in the office.

It leaks into everything. I feel like an imposter at dinner. In friendships. In conversations where I am clearly welcome. I feel like an imposter in my own relationship, in my own house, in my own face in the mirror. When something good happens, it feels like it happened to the character, not to me. When someone says they love me, part of me is checking the exit, because surely they mean the version of me that I am performing.

That is the thing nobody tells you. Imposter syndrome gets a lot easier to understand when you realise some of us are not only pretending to be competent. We are pretending to be a person at all.

Watching from the back of my own head#

Here is what it actually feels like, as best I can describe it.

• I am not in my body. I am slightly behind it, or above it, or just to one side.
• My hands do things and I watch them do it.
• I hear my voice and it sounds like a recording of someone I know.
• I can have a full conversation and not feel any ownership of it.
• Big moments land softly, like wrapped in cotton wool. A wedding, a birthday, good news, bad news. I can see that it matters. I just cannot always feel it matter.
• Sometimes the world looks a bit flat, like a film set, like I am looking at it through glass.
• I look in a mirror and have to remind myself that the face is mine.

From the outside, nobody sees any of it. That is the cruel part. I look present. I say the right words. The observer is very, very good at running the character.

What I have learned it is called#

For years I did not have language for any of this. I just thought I was strange.

What I have since found is that there are names for it. Depersonalisation is the feeling of being detached from your own body, thoughts, or feelings, like an outside observer of your own life. Derealisation is the sibling: the world around you feels foggy, distant, or not quite real. Together they sit under the wider umbrella of dissociation, where the mind disconnects from the present moment, from the body, or from emotion.

A few things made me exhale when I read about it.

• It is common as a brief experience. A lot of people have felt it for a moment during stress, exhaustion, or panic.
• When it becomes constant, it is usually linked to something, often chronic stress, anxiety, depression, trauma, or growing up having to survive more than feel.
• The core feature of the experience is that you know it is a feeling. You know you are real in the sense that you are the one noticing. That is what separates it from losing touch with reality. It does not mean you are going mad.

I am not diagnosing myself in a blog post, and I am not telling you how to diagnose yourself either. I am saying: if the words fit, that is worth knowing.

Why the mind does this#

The best way I have found to think about it is this.

Dissociation is a protective move. At some point, being fully present in my body and my feelings was too much, or not safe, or not survivable, or just not something I had help to handle. So the mind found a trick. It stepped back. It watched instead of felt. It turned the volume down on the whole experience so I could keep going.

That works. It works really well. It is genuinely clever.

The problem is that it does not know when to stop. A response that saved me at ten years old is still running at the same setting at an adult age, in a safe room, with people who love me. The alarm is long over, but the observer is still on shift.

And that is where imposter syndrome and dissociation meet. If you are watching your life from behind glass, of course you feel like a fraud. Of course you feel like you got away with something. You are not living it from inside. You are acting it from the outside, and part of you knows that.

What it costs#

I do not want to dramatise this, but I do want to be honest about the cost.

It is lonely. You can be surrounded by people and feel like you are behind a window. You can be loved and not quite receive it. You can accomplish something and feel nothing, then feel guilty about feeling nothing.

It makes joy feel thin and grief feel far away. It makes it hard to trust your own memories, because you were not fully there for them. It makes it hard to believe anything about yourself, because the "self" doing the believing feels borrowed.

And it makes you very good at coping, which means nobody ever checks on you.

What helps, for me, so far#

I do not have this solved. I want to be clear about that. This is not a post that ends with a tidy fix. But here are the things that have helped me even a little, in case they help you.

• Naming it. Saying "this is dissociation" in the moment takes some of the fear out. It is a state, not a fact about me.
• Coming back through the senses. Cold water on my hands. Feet flat on the floor. Naming five things I can see. It is boring and it works more often than I expected.
• Safe people. Being around someone who makes me feel calm, not on guard, brings me back into my body faster than anything I can do on my own. When the nervous system is not on fire, the observer has less to protect me from.
• Movement. Walking, lifting, anything that puts me back in my muscles and my breathing.
• Sleep and not running on empty. Exhaustion makes the glass thicker.
• Not fighting it. The harder I try to force myself to feel real, the more unreal it gets. Gentle curiosity works better than panic.
• Talking to a professional. If this is your background, trauma-informed therapy is worth looking for. This is not something you have to white-knuckle alone.

To anyone who feels like this#

If you read this and thought "that is me", I want you to hear a few things.

You are not broken. You are not fake. You are not the only one.

The fact that you can observe yourself so clearly is the proof that someone is there. The observer is you. You are not an empty room. You are a person who learned to stand back, and you can learn, slowly and safely, to step forward again.

I am still working on that. Some days I feel a bit closer to my own skin. Some days I do not. But I would rather say this out loud than keep pretending I am fine, because the pretending is exactly the thing that kept me behind the glass.

If you are struggling and it feels heavy, please talk to someone: a GP, a therapist, or someone you trust. If you are in the UK and in a dark place right now, Samaritans are free to call on 116 123, any time.

I do not feel real most days. But I am here, and I am writing this, and that counts for something.

References#

• Clance and Imes, The imposter phenomenon in high achieving women: dynamics and therapeutic intervention (1978)
• Mayo Clinic, Depersonalization-derealization disorder: symptoms and causes
• NHS, Dissociative disorders
• Samaritans, free support 24/7 on 116 123