Imposter Syndrome and the Problem of the Perfect Circle

I’m going to be bold here and make a blanket statement.

If you have been a writer (or artist, or musician, or photographer, or any other type of creative) for any significant length of time, you have, at some point, experienced Imposter Syndrome.

Simply put, Imposter Syndrome, also referred to as Imposter Phenomenon, is an individual’s perception that despite significant evidence that they are adept at a particular task or in their field of expertise, they are not as good as others.

The more entrenched this perception becomes, the less productive a person will be. This can be a real obstacle for writers and other creatives, particularly because the work they do on a daily basis is largely subjective and if they think it’s garbage, they’re sure other people will, too.

Over my thirty-year career as a screenwriter and author, I’ve suffered from IP many times. For me, it came and went without any real trigger. Sometimes I had it, sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I’d read my writing and think it was brilliant and sometimes I’d think it was Scheiss, even though it was always most likely somewhere in between.

Because I’ve worked for so many years in this industry, I’ve become quite good at deciphering good writing from bad. I’ve also put in my proverbial ten thousand hours, which if you agree with Malcolm Gladwell, makes me an expert. And yet, there were times when, as the syndrome suggests, I felt far less skilled than my colleagues.

My prefrontal cortex knows that a three-decade career is unlikely to be a fluke and that I do actually know what I’m doing even when my limbic system bullies it into quiet submission. Tired of random bullying and confident that this disruptive perception can be eliminated through logic, my prefrontal cortex encouraged me to do a little research.

I’m going to share that research with you. I hope that when you feel like an imposter, the information I’ve gleaned will help.

It all starts with the problem of the perfect circle.

Sit back for a moment, close your eyes, and envision a perfect black circle against a solid white background.

Yes, like that one.

Now, pick up a pen and draw that perfect black circle on a white sheet of paper. Go on, I’ll wait.

Once you’re finished, look at the circle you’ve drawn. Does it match the circle you imagined? Is it indeed perfect?

I don’t need to see your circle to know that the answer is no. You did not draw a perfect circle. Try once more. Do better this time.

Okay. Is this one perfect? Or is it just a teensy bit lopsided and irregular? Be honest. Is it more of an ellipse or an oval than a circle?

Don’t feel inadequate. I gave you an impossible task. No one can draw a perfect circle.

To draw a perfect circle, you would need to eyeball the infinite number of points around the circle’s circumference with each point exactly equidistant from the center. For it to truly be perfect, every single one of these points would need to be precise from particle level.

While perfect circles exist mathematically, humans are not physically capable of this level of infinite precision. The muscles in our hands and fingers, as well as limitations in our hand-eye coordination and depth-perception, and even minute imperfections in the fibers that make up the paper and the slightly uneven flow of the ink through the tip of the pen keep us from being able to accomplish the task. Our human bodies are simply not capable of that level of accuracy.

And yet, it was relatively easy to sit back and imagine that perfect circle, wasn’t it? When I asked you to picture the circle, did you even really need to close your eyes? Probably not. Which means that our minds certainly are capable of that level of accuracy. The cognitive load of being able to recognize or imagine a perfect circle is much less than it takes to actually create one.

And while that may seem discouraging on some level, that our physical bodies are so limited that we cannot even draw a perfect circle, the truth is, a perfect circle doesn’t even exist in the physical world. It only exists mathematically. You’ll never, ever find one in nature.

Consider all things in nature that are round enough that they could potentially be perfect circles:  lakes, tree branches and trunks ( cross-sections of course), rocks, clouds, oranges, the moon, bubbles, etc. And yet, not a single one of those things has ever been a perfect circle.

Image by Freepik.com

If God, or the Universe, or whatever macrocosm you subscribe to, hasn’t done it, we shouldn’t feel bad about not being able to do it.

Given this information, there are two questions to be asked:

First, if none of us have ever seen a perfect circle, how is it that we can imagine one so easily?

Second, if it doesn’t exist in nature, which has produced highly complex systems and organisms able to sustain life, is being able to create a perfect circle important on any level at all?

We can imagine a perfect circle because our brains are wired to understand simple mathematical concepts. The idea of points that are equidistant from a center point, is easy to visualize.

Just because we can visualize it, doesn’t mean that we can create it. Obviously.

But that’s the nature of Imposter Syndrome. When the words you put on the page, or the paint you press onto the canvas, doesn’t live up to the image you’ve created in your mind, IP slips in. You feel like an imposter because you have failed at representing in the physical world what you envisioned in your mind.

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It doesn’t, however, make sense to feel like a failure when you don’t succeed at something that was impossible from the start.

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If, prior to reading this, you’d drawn a circle and were told it wasn’t perfect and asked to redraw it, how many times would you attempt to draw that circle before you gave up? Five? Ten? Fifty? The moment you decide to give up, you feel you’ve failed. If you believe other people are drawing perfect circles, you’ll compare your lack of ability to what you perceive their abilities to be. And you will inevitably fall short. Every. Single. Time.

So, by recognizing that the perfect circle is impossible to draw, and that the image in your mind is impossible to create on paper with words or on a canvas with paint, you free yourself from feeling inadequate over failing at an impossible task.

By accepting that we are physically limited to the colors our eyes can see, the paint strokes our muscles can create, the words available to us in a language that doesn’t come close to accurately describing or expressing every color, thought, and emotion, we can come to understand that we are not imposters. While some writers can draw from a more expanded vocabulary and some painters can ‘paint from imagination’ more readily than others, there’s a good chance they’ve felt like imposters at times, too. Afterall, they have limbic systems as well.

It’s okay to accept our limitations. Not just okay. It’s absolutely necessary. By doing so, we will never feel like we’ve failed. By not comparing ourselves to others, we can never feel like an imposter as Imposter Syndrome implies that others are doing something we cannot.

I recently met a very talented artist at an art show. We started talking about that moment when the artist knows that the piece of art is complete. I mentioned that I’d been to a gallery that had huge floor-to-ceiling paintings of royal figures that were beautiful and lifelike and provocative, and then the artist, once they had created that detalied image which must’ve taken months (if not years), had stepped back, dunked their brush into the can of paint, and swung their arm wildly through the air, causing the paint to splatter in random patterns over the image.

“The confidence and abandon it must’ve taken for them to do that, not knowing if they were going to ruin the incredibly precise image they had spent so much time creating beforehand!” I said. “This is where I always get stopped. This is where I know I don’t have the confidence. I could not work so hard on something and get it so close to perfect, and then not know if in the last, uncontrolled decision I make, if I’m going to mess the whole thing up.”

The artist smiled and said, “But how do you know if it’s messed up or not? It is what it is after the paint is splattered, just like it was what it was prior to the paint being splattered. Neither one is right and neither one is wrong. Neither is better than the other. They both just ‘are’ what they ‘are.’”

That’s the moment that a lot of this made sense to me. She had found my flaw. I could not let go and let it be different than what I had imagined. While I’ve managed to let go in my writing (mostly because I save previous drafts that I can always revert back to if I feel it was better than the revision), I had not been able to do it with painting. You can’t do it with painting. Once the paint hits the canvas, it’s there. If you don’t like it, you have to paint over it, but it’ll always be there.

When it came to painting, I was still chasing the perfect representation of the picture in my mind. I was still under the erroneous impression that if the canvas didn’t match the visual I’d created, I had failed.

And yet, it never could have matched the image I’d visualized.

The perfect circle doesn’t exist, and we’ve lived our entire lives in this big, beautiful, complex, imperfect world without it.

You are not an imposter.

So why not wildly swing the paintbrush and see what happens?

Until next time, friends, happy writing!

Christine Conradt is a screenwriter/author/director/producer with more than 100 produced credits. She ruminates weekly via substack on creativity and the craft and business of writing. If you find her posts interesting and inspiring, please subscribe. Free subscribers receive two posts per month. Paid subscribers receive four posts, access to archived posts, the ability to comment, and discounts on Christine’s coaching/consulting services, and live webinars.