Imposter

Although I have worked as a teacher for almost forty years, my confidence in my skills and abilities has never been strong, not even at the end of my long career. From the very first class I taught, aged 24, in a language school in Bournemouth to the final class last year in August 2023 at the university where I worked, I had ongoing doubts about my “performance” in the classroom that became stronger and more debilitating with the passage of time. And it was these doubts that finally made me hit a brick wall in teaching, so much so that I was unable to teach even one more class.

On the day I resigned from my job with the University of Southampton, my coordinator told me he suspected that I was suffering from “imposter syndrome.” I’d never heard the expression before, but I guessed what it meant there and then, right at the end of my career. Both my coordinator and the course coordinator went to some lengths to convince me that I was an excellent teacher. They’d read the feedback and observed the way I interacted with students and other members of staff, concluding that I was an accomplished professional. That was not how I viewed myself at all.

Every justification my coordinator put forward to support his professional view of me could be batted aside, and I did bat them all aside. Student feedback, for example, could not be accurate because they probably liked me as a person and were therefore going to be biased in their view of my teaching abilities, unwilling to say anything negative about me. Of course, I’d been observed teaching by a senior member of university staff and given excellent feedback, but that was ten years previously and it was a one-off situation, a lucky day for me. Since then, I was convinced that my abilities in the classroom had taken a nosedive. And I knew why they had taken a nosedive.

In 2013 I was prescribed an antipsychotic medication that the psychiatrist advised me to take on those occasions when I was going through the challenges associated with a mental health crisis. He was referring to the symptoms of PTSD,* which was a condition I’d suffered from for decades. It was a constant blight on my life that made the struggle to keep going even more challenging. Combined with the expectations of teachers working in a top UK university, it was enough to send me spiralling down to the very bottom, right into that crisis. Fear did it. The ice cold fear of failing in a top rank institution with excellent academic credentials was enough to push me over the edge. In the summer of 2012, my first summer with the university, I’d walked toward the fear as the day approached to commence teaching. Then I walked through the fear as the course progressed, and when it ended I came out the other end, much diminished by chronic insomnia and anxiety. Strangely, I was on a bit of a high at the same time – a mixture of exhaustion and jubilation at being in so much suffering and yet still succeeding.

But I couldn’t put myself through that again. That was the reasoning behind my request for stronger medication to help me survive the next presessional course, which ended in September 2013. A month before the course started I tested the antipsychotics and although they did help me sleep; they impaired my short-term memory and there was no doubt about that. However, on the evening of the first day of the course I noticed that my thinking processes were considerably slower and clumsier than usual and I was finding it harder to focus my attention. For example, I constantly forgot my Chinese students’ names and, even worse, when they were called upon to do some sort of exercise such as presentations, I could not recall who had spoken and who hadn’t. It was embarrassing. The pills had “dumbed me down”, but I thought this would pass once I got used to the medication. It didn’t.

The chronic insomnia and anxiety that went hand-in-hand with meeting the demands of my job while suffering from PTSD made it impossible for me to stop taking antipsychotics when under pressure. However, I did manage to stop taking them when I wasn’t working and that was when I felt normal again, on top of things, like I used to be. Then Doha happened.

I’d accepted the offer of a 3-month teaching contract in the capital of Qatar. It would be a new experience for me because I’d never been to the Middle East before and I looked forward to escaping from an Irish winter for three months. The job involved teaching general English to classes of adults and children. All in all, I had seven groups and a total of 24 teaching hours per week, so it was a heavy teaching schedule and the stress of the workload was compounded by the fact that I hadn’t taught these levels for years. Still, I felt confident I could do it if I worked hard at preparing my lessons.

By week 2 of the contract, I was struggling a bit to keep up with the demands of the position, so I resolved to spend all my spare time in the teachers’ staffroom preparing. On Tuesday evening of that week, I’d just begun the lesson with a group of around a dozen adults when one of them, a man, stood up and shouted at me. “This is rubbish!” Everyone in the room, including me, froze, unable to assimilate what had just happened. His explosion of anger went through me like a bolt of lightning, killing part of me, a part that would never recover. All my confidence left me there and then. That night was when the imposter syndrome really got it’s claws into me. The student had seen through my “charade,” right through to who I really was, a bumbling fool of a teacher. The experience was traumatising and I sensed that my career as a teacher would inevitably suffer because I would not be able to leave this incident behind.

After that public humiliation, I managed to stagger on to the end of my contract in Doha; but those three months felt like an eternity. In order to cope, I had to continue taking the antipsychotic medication every night, knowing all the while that it would take its toll on my classroom performance. Before each class I silently prayed that I would survive my time in Doha without any further incidents. It seemed to be the only recourse I had – an appeal to God. Later in my contract I felt some small consolation when I was told that such humiliations are almost routine in the Middle East and that many other teaching staff, according to one senior teacher, had also endured the same. Apparently, in the Gulf States a culture of complaining exists which leaves very few teachers unharmed. That piece of information was shared with me by another teacher one afternoon when I found her crying alone in the toilets. I just wish I had been given advance warning.

Almost everywhere I went in Doha there were billboards exclaiming Qatar: We are Proud of You. Seeing them felt like a slap in the face to me. These billboards, plus my experience in the classroom, together with the numerous building sites where thin, brown-skinned workers laboured for pitifully low wages, added up to hideousness. I saw very little, indeed nothing, to be proud of in Qatar. Exploitation and humiliation were everywhere, side by side with opulence and insensitivity. It seemed to me that they, the Qataris, were the real imposters priding themselves on a repulsive social and economic system.

The legacy of the time I spent in Qatar was that it cemented the imposter syndrome in my psyche and blighted the remainder of my career as a teacher…an experience that I could have done without as I was already highly vulnerable…

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*PTSD – posttraumatic stress disorder.