Impostor Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome shapes Lindy West’s early uncertainty about becoming a writer and makes her eventual career feel, in retrospect, both surprising and long foreshadowed. The belief that she had too few ideas did not keep her from writing; it helped steer her toward an unpaid internship where she began accumulating experience, until comedy work made the old self-doubt harder to sustain.

Graduation and Self-Doubt

West graduated in 2004 with an English degree, but her Impostor Syndrome was intense enough to convince her she did not have enough ideas to become a writer of any kind. She described herself as someone with only a partial ability to make sentences, while resisting the label of writer. The contradiction was already present: she could name a writing skill, yet treated it as insufficient evidence that writing might be her work.

Her uncertainty was not a lack of interest in comedy or in writing. She wanted to be immersed in comedy’s creation and consumption, and imagined the television writers’ room as a place where people were paid to riff with friends and build the richly imagined worlds that had felt like family to her growing up. But that attraction did not yet translate into confidence that she belonged in a writing career.

The Internship as a Starting Point

With no clear alternative, West took an unpaid internship at a free parenting magazine in the Valley. The publication was largely coupons and advertisements, with a small number of articles written by interns; its editorial staff consisted of three people, including West, while sales seemed to have hundreds. The mismatch between the magazine’s modest editorial operation and its expansive advertising presence made the internship an unlikely proving ground, but she tried to get writing clips from it anyway.

Working twenty hours a week for no pay in a windowless Encino office, West was assigned parenting advice despite feeling profoundly unqualified to give it. Her subjects ranged from what to do if a child was a bully to whether parents should bank a baby’s umbilical-cord blood. She answered these assignments with comic uncertainty, even as she continued producing the pieces. The work did not instantly resolve her doubts; it did, however, put her inside the activity she had hesitated to claim as a profession.

The Career That Had Been Foreshadowed

Seven years later, West was going to comedy shows at night, interviewing comics, watching television and movies for a living, and writing jokes for the newspaper during the day. The realization that she was being paid both to watch comedy and to make people laugh marked a sharp reversal from the graduate who believed she lacked the ideas to write. Her career had not emerged from a sudden declaration of confidence so much as from sustained work that eventually made the old judgment untenable.

That reversal gave new meaning to her Autobiography-class presentation on comedy. West contrasted her own trajectory with classmates’ presentations, which, as far as she knew, had not predicted their eventual professions; the assignment had been intended as a throwaway exercise, not a forecast. For someone who had struggled for years to define herself, discovering that her presentation had anticipated the course of her life transformed an apparent embarrassment into a source of wonder. Impostor Syndrome belongs to the gap between that early inability to imagine herself as a writer and the later evidence of a life organized around comedy and words.