The great façade: Everyone seems to be breezing through their A-levels, am I just not good enough?

Have you ever been in your lesson and suddenly felt like you’re just not good enough? Like you don’t understand what the teacher is saying and you feel like you never will. You sink into a deeper and deeper hole of thinking that you just can’t grasp this subject. What’s worse people around you seem to completely grasp what is going on - hell, they are even raising their hands and asking questions! These self-esteem crushing thoughts are circling around in your head and the things happening around you seem to reinforce the way you’re feeling. What if you never get it? What if this just isn’t for you? Surely there’s something wrong with you if you’re the only one who doesn’t seem to get it? Well here’s what we have to say over here at BLOSSOM: WRONG WRONG WRONG AND WRONG! You are having a bad day, not a bad academic career.

1) Literally everyone at some point has felt exactly like you do.

I know you probably rolled your eyes at that first point. I know you have heard ‘You are not alone’ so many times now that the phrase has probably lost meaning to you. But people repeat it because it is actually true. In fact, what you are feeling right now actually has a name: impostor syndrome. You are doubting your ability even though you are definitely more than able to do whatever work has been put in front of you. Your annoying yet great brain has somehow convinced you that you can’t do something that you literally have been doing for months. This is irrational. The way you are feeling is temporary, it is not some precursor to the future.

2) Sometimes people don’t actually know stuff, they’re just really good at pretending they do. You don’t know what happens behind closed doors.

This one sounds almost dodgy but it's true. That person that always seems to get the answers to the questions when you’ve only just been taught a concept has just probably done some pre reading before the lesson so that now it seems like they are the class genius. And if you ask them and tell you they haven’t they are either a) lying or b) aren’t lying and maybe grasp concepts faster but this doesn’t mean that they are cleverer. It doesn’t really make sense that you might assume that someone is smarter because they grasped something faster - speed doesn’t equate intelligence.

3) For a lot of people, they aren’t a lot of things in our environment that encourage us (especially as a woman in STEM).

Sometimes when we feel like we’re not good enough, we have a habit of internalising all these thoughts and almost analysing ourselves in a void which leads us to completely blame ourselves. The way you feel is also created by external factors and then internalised. You might think you are not good enough because people are not necessarily encouraging you or they might even be deterring you. Especially as a woman in STEM, you are more likely to feel like this - not because you have imposed this onto yourself but because you are not being encouraged at all. We may pretend like we don’t care what people think but this simply isn’t the truth. We are not saying that you cannot motivate yourself and believe in yourself, it’s just that when the obstacles we are facing are people, this makes things a bit harder and it’s easier for these negative thoughts to linger.

4) STEM subjects are not magical subjects, people just act like they are.

This bit was taken in one of website pages under ‘Defeating the STEM demon’ and it goes like this:

‘Also there's a stigma around sciences and maths as if it's some God given gift only imposed to a few of us at birth so when anyone is good at it, we all turn into that Maybelline advert and assume that they're born with it. THIS IS A LIE.Anyone can do maths or science, all it takes is practise, hard work and determination. Magical predetermined powers are simply irrelevant in this equation, pun very much intended.’

There is a mysticism around STEM subjects which is often reinforced in Hollywood movies, which seems to feed into the idea of the ‘born genius’ and how intelligence is measured by how quickly it is to grasp things (refer to last point). Once again, not this determine how smart you are. You have a brain, therefore you can learn this - that’s really all it takes.

5) You are good enough, whether you feel like you are or not right now.

Feelings like this probably don’t feel very temporary and they can become permanent if not dealt with (in terms of you may stop doing a lot of things because you have convinced yourself you cannot and you have stopped believing in yourself) but this is learned behaviour so therefore it can be unlearned. Those thoughts that are telling you you’re not good enough are not yours. They have been imposed on you by others around you but now it just sounds like you because you have gotten used to them, so now they have your voice. You have to look at how far you’ve come and understand that you really can learn anything if you put your mind to it. Believing in yourself is a crucial part of that? Who taught you not to believe in yourself? Analyse why you feel like this and then start to dismantle it.