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Befriending Our Impostor Syndrome
How we can learn to deal with impostor syndrome by learning from our doppelganger.
Doppelgangers, or otherworldly creatures that look exactly like us have always fascinated me since I first heard about them from the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering as a kid.
You may be most familiar with doppelgangers from the 2013 British film The Double, which brings us a doppelganger replacing an officer worker’s life, or Jordan Peele’s 2019 movie Us that showcases an entire family of deranged doppelgangers from beneath the Santa Cruz boardwalk. While these are both creepy films, the idea of an exact double actually has a much more positive origin.
The term doppelganger was actually first coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796, in his novel Siebenkas which is about a man who meets his own doppelganger and gets love advice from it. The protagonist leaves an unhappy marriage by faking his own death and then goes on to find his true love.
While faking your own death to get out of marriage seems extreme, divorce wasn’t really a thing in Germany until the late 1800s. So back then it was probably some sound advice.
Regardless, this idea that one can get advice from a version of yourself is what I’d like to focus on as the…
