The Honest Imposter
I remember the year I stopped being a musician for the first time—or rather, the year I stepped sideways into something that looked nothing like music, though it quietly rested on the same principles. In the spring of 1997, I was in my fifth year of touring with Glueleg: carrying amplifiers into repurposed auditoriums and soft-seater halls, moving from rehearsal rooms to buses to stages that blurred into one long life-style. A year later I was in Amsterdam, sitting at a table with software engineers, passionately explaining how sound and video might share space inside what was still called “the World Wide Web.” It was exciting and uncertain in equal measure, and more than once I wondered if I truly belonged there at all.
The shift looked kind of radical from the outside, and felt improbable from the inside. I didn’t have a computer science degree, didn’t speak the language of algorithms or networks with any fluency. And yet—I had done the work. Years in recording studios had taught me sequencing, layering, editing: the grammar of digital time. Music videos had drilled into me the choreography of synchronised streams across a single canvas. Multimedia for the web wasn’t a leap into thin air so much as an extension of what I’d already been practicing for years—just without knowing what to call it.
That paradox—that I was both unqualified and overprepared—was the essence of what I would later understand as impostor syndrome: the sensation of being on the verge of unmasking, just as the evidence of competence gathers around you. I signed contracts worth more money than I had imagined likely, projects that seemed audacious for someone who had only recently stepped off a sweaty stage. But beneath the numbers was the unease of occupying a space that belonged to someone more sanctioned, more official.
What I see now is that this fracture was also a sign of the times. Innovation often comes from people carrying fragments across domains, from the unorthodox grafting of one discipline onto another. Outsiders become translators, importing techniques before there is a vocabulary or credential to legitimise them. I thought I was an impostor because I didn’t match the existing template.
Looking back, those moments were the proof that imposture and creativity are entangled. To create is to step into a role you don’t yet fully inhabit—to project a mask that feels provisional, until the work itself makes it real. New beginnings often share this quality. It feels like pretending—until it doesn’t.
A History of Imposture
In 1978, two psychologists, Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, first described what they called the Impostor Phenomenon. Their research, focused on high-achieving women who consistently discounted their success, captured a pattern of thought: the conviction that achievements were undeserved, that one had somehow fooled others into overestimating one’s ability.
What struck me, was how much of their description hinged on context. These women were breaking into male-dominated spaces—academia, medicine, corporate management—where the rules of recognition had been written by others. No wonder they felt fraudulent: the yardsticks were never designed for them. The syndrome was less a private pathology than a mirror of exclusion.
Over time, this concept had broadened. Psychologists began noting it in men as well, in people of colour navigating predominantly white institutions, in anyone stepping across lines of class or discipline. The common denominator wasn’t gender so much as position: to feel like an impostor is to feel misaligned with the structure of authority—to lack the inherited credentials or sanctioned lineage that would let one belong without question.
That’s why it resonates so strongly in creative fields. Art, music, writing, technology—these are domains where the very act of innovation means stepping outside established categories. A painter who abandons figuration for abstraction, a composer layering field recordings into a symphony, a coder experimenting with multimedia on the web before broadband had caught up—all risk fraudulence precisely because they are building ground as they walk. The fear of exposure is inseparable from the act of originality.
And yet imposture also has a long, unruly cultural history. Fraud and forgery have haunted the arts for centuries—from Han van Meegeren’s “Vermeers” that fooled experts, to Duchamp placing a urinal in a gallery, to today’s controversies over AI-generated slop. Sometimes imposture is condemned; other times it becomes canon, retrospectively reclassified as genius. The line between fraud and foresight has never been stable. Which raises the deeper question: if innovation always looks illegitimate at first, is imposture not a pathology at all, but an inherent aspect of the creative process?
Fraud and the Mask
There is a necessary distinction to be made. Not every imposture is the same. On the one hand, there is the felt imposture of the creator—those internal tremors of inadequacy that accompany genuine leaps into the unknown. On the other, the performed imposture of the grifter—the deliberate manipulation of signs of expertise without substance beneath them.
The two can look similar from the outside. A young designer claiming fluency in a new technology; a charismatic startup founder pitching software that does not yet exist. One may be ingeniously innovating with cross-domain expertise, the other selling a mirage. The challenge is telling them apart.
But impostor syndrome belongs to the first category. It is the mask you wear not to deceive others, but to cross a threshold yourself. Innovation often arrives disguised as risk, as audacity. And yet without this provisional mask, nothing new would truly enter the world.
This is why so many artists, writers, and innovators report feeling fraudulent at precisely the moments when their work is most alive. A mask to be worn until it becomes your face.
The Digital Impostor
In our age of generative AI, who is the impostor? A text spun by a large language model can mimic fluency, cadence, without the long-form research and dedication that usually gives birth to a unique voice. A visual image conjured by a diffusion model can echo centuries of painting in seconds. To some, this is pure grift—the machinery of imitation passing itself off as creation. To others, it is simply the next evolution of tools: an accelerant for human imagination.
But even here, the line is unstable. AI itself does not suffer impostor syndrome; it has no inner fracture or anxiety of legitimacy. The imposture belongs to us—to the humans using these systems, sometimes pretending to mastery we do not yet fully possess, sometimes feeling fraudulent even when our expertise is real. Perhaps this is the defining tension of the digital present: never before have the masks been so easy to wear, or the fear of exposure been so pervasive.
Generative Imposture
What distinguishes fraudulence from generative imposture is not the mask itself but what it conceals: behind one, a grift; behind the other, a practice already unfolding, a preparation already lived. I was not an impostor in Amsterdam because I lacked merit; I only felt like one because I lacked a lineage. The system had no template for a musician crossing into web-based multimedia design, so I carried my own. The mask was temporary, a bridge until the shape of the work clarified itself.
In this light, impostor syndrome is not a pathology to be cured but a signal to be read. It tells us we are out of alignment with the familiar categories, that we are operating in a space where recognition lags behind reality. The trick is not to silence the feeling but to transmute it—to use the unease as proof that something new is entering the world.
When creative discipline meets an unfamiliar medium, the feeling of imposture is almost guaranteed. The artist, engineer, or designer who brings deep process knowledge into a new domain carries latent energy and intention—an applied intelligence searching for new form. True innovation emerges from the collision of mastered craft and fresh constraint, where experience from one field becomes scaffolding in another. This is how progress happens: by recognising that the tools of ideation, iteration, and applied problem-solving are transferable languages. In that sense, impostor syndrome can be understood as a by-product of crossing thresholds where expertise momentarily outpaces its own definition—not a disguise, but an instrument that lets us build new things before the world has quite decided what to call them.