I don't think about impostor syndrome in the same way anymore
For a long time, I thought about impostor syndrome quite a lot.
I spoke about it. I reflected on it. I tried to understand where it came from and why it seemed to sit there in the background for so much of my career and life in general.
It was one of those ideas that felt immediately recognisable. The sense that you are not quite where people think you are. The quiet worry that you have somehow ended up in rooms you are not meant to be in. The feeling that, at some point, something will be exposed.
I don’t think I was alone in that. Far from it.
Impostor syndrome has become one of the most common ways people describe a particular kind of internal discomfort. It gives a name to something many of us have felt, especially in careers where progression is visible, comparison is constant and confidence is often mistaken for certainty.
For years, it felt like the right explanation for me as well.
Now I am not so sure.
Since being diagnosed as autistic, I don’t really think about impostor syndrome much at all. That shift has been one of the more surprising things for me, because I had assumed it was something I would always carry in some form. It seemed too embedded. Too familiar. Too tied up with how I had experienced work and progression for most of my life.
But since the diagnosis, it has gone quieter.
Not because my career suddenly became easier.
Not because all self-doubt disappeared.
And not because I became a completely different person overnight.
What changed was something else.
I understood myself differently.
That has made me question how much of what I used to call impostor syndrome was actually impostor syndrome at all.
The version of me I was trying to explain
For most of my career, there were parts of my experience that did not fully line up with the way other people seemed to move through work.
I could do the job. I could lead. I could think strategically. I could build relationships, present, write, influence and make difficult decisions.
But there was often a second layer underneath all of that.
A kind of constant monitoring.
Was I saying the right thing? Had I misread the situation? Was I overthinking something everyone else found straightforward? Why did some interactions seem to drain me so much more than they appeared to drain other people? Why did certain environments feel manageable one day and completely overwhelming the next?
None of this was obvious from the outside.
In many ways, things were going well. My career progressed. I moved into bigger roles. I led larger teams. I built credibility. From the outside, there was plenty of evidence that I knew what I was doing.
And yet there was still that internal sense of friction.
At the time, impostor syndrome felt like the best label available. It explained the gap between external evidence and internal certainty. It explained why achievement did not always settle anything. It explained why being capable did not necessarily feel the same as feeling secure.
But I now think that label was doing too much work.
When the explanation no longer fits properly
The interesting thing about a diagnosis later in life is that it does not just explain the present. It reshapes the past.
You start looking back at experiences, reactions, habits and coping strategies through a different lens. Things that once looked unrelated begin to form a pattern. Things that felt like separate quirks or private struggles begin to make more sense together.
That has definitely been true for me.
What I used to interpret as professional insecurity often looks different now.
Some of it looks like difference in processing.
Some of it looks like the effort of navigating environments that were never especially well suited to how I think.
Some of it looks like the cost of sustained masking, or the habit of constantly calibrating yourself against what seems normal for everyone else.
Some of it looks like the exhaustion that comes from trying to meet expectations you have never consciously questioned, even when they are not a natural fit.
Once I began to understand that, the old story about impostor syndrome started to loosen.
Because if the discomfort was not coming from being fraudulent, inadequate or less capable than people thought, then what exactly was it?
In many cases, I think it was the experience of being different without knowing why.
That is not the same thing.
The problem with broad labels
I am not trying to dismiss impostor syndrome as an idea. I think it clearly resonates with a lot of people for a reason.
But I do think broad labels can become a bit too convenient, especially when they flatten very different experiences into the same explanation.
If someone feels out of place at work, we might quickly call it impostor syndrome.
If someone struggles to absorb praise or settle into their own capability, we might call it impostor syndrome.
If someone overprepares, second guesses themselves, feels socially misaligned or finds certain environments much harder than expected, again, we might call it impostor syndrome.
Sometimes that might be right.
But sometimes it might be covering something else entirely.
That is the part I keep thinking about.
How many people are carrying around a story about self-doubt when the deeper issue is actually difference, friction, sensory load, processing style, burnout, masking or years of trying to force themselves into a shape that was never quite right?
How many of us have been given a very familiar explanation for something that needed a much more personal one?
Why it has changed my relationship with myself
The most noticeable shift since diagnosis has not been that I suddenly feel confident all the time. That would not be true.
It is that I no longer interpret every difficult internal moment as evidence that something is wrong with me.
That is a huge difference.
Before, discomfort often came with an extra layer of judgement. If something felt hard, I was more likely to question myself. If I found an environment draining, or struggled to make sense of the dynamics in a room, or needed time to process something others seemed to move through quickly, it was easier to read that as weakness, lack or inadequacy.
Now, I am much more likely to ask a different question.
What is actually happening here?
That sounds simple, but it has been transformative.
Sometimes the answer is that I am tired. Sometimes it is that I have been overloaded. Sometimes it is that the context is noisy, unclear or mentally expensive in ways that are not obvious from the outside. Sometimes it is that I need to structure something differently, communicate differently or use tools differently.
That is a much more useful place to start than assuming I am not enough.
Why AI and tools fit into this for me
This is also one of the reasons I have found tools like AI genuinely useful in ways that go beyond hype.
A lot of discussion around AI still swings between extremes. Either it is presented as a threat, or it is presented as some magical answer to everything. Most of my experience with it is much more practical than that.
It helps me think.
It helps me structure.
It helps me get ideas out of my head and into a form I can work with more easily.
It helps me sense-check language, shape writing and create a bit of breathing room between thought and communication.
That is not because it is doing the thinking for me. It is because it supports parts of my process that can otherwise become noisy or effortful.
Before diagnosis, I might have just seen that as another workaround, or another sign that I needed to find better ways of coping.
Now I see it differently.
I see it as support.
And that shift matters.
The same thing applies more broadly. The more I understand how I actually work, the less interested I am in whether my way of doing something looks typical from the outside. What matters more is whether it is effective, sustainable and honest.
The disappearance of a familiar feeling
One of the strangest things about all of this is how quiet some of that old impostor language has become for me.
It used to be very present.
Not always dramatically. Not constantly in a way that would stop everything. But enough to be part of the background. Enough that I would think about it regularly. Enough that it shaped how I interpreted certain moments.
Now, it barely shows up.
That does not mean I never doubt myself. Of course I do.
It does not mean I never have difficult days or awkward moments or situations where I feel stretched.
What it means is that I am no longer using the same explanation for those moments.
And once the explanation changes, the emotional weight changes as well.
Something that once felt like a personal flaw starts to look more like something that needs understanding, accommodation or a different kind of support.
That is far easier to work with.
What I wish I had understood earlier
I think the thing I wish I had understood earlier is that not all internal discomfort means the same thing.
Not every struggle at work is about confidence.
Not every feeling of difference means you are lacking.
Not every moment of uncertainty is proof that you do not belong.
Sometimes it means you are in the wrong environment for how you work best. Sometimes it means you are carrying more than people realise. Sometimes it means you have spent years learning how to function in ways that come with a cost you have never had language for.
That does not make those experiences smaller.
If anything, it makes them more real.
It just means the answer might not be to keep pushing confidence harder, or to keep rehearsing a story about impostor syndrome, or to assume the solution is simply to believe in yourself more.
Sometimes the answer starts with understanding.
Where I’ve landed with it
I have not landed on a grand theory here.
I am not trying to say that impostor syndrome is always a misread version of neurodivergence, or that everyone who experiences one is necessarily dealing with the other.
But for me, there is clearly a relationship worth paying attention to.
A diagnosis gave me a different framework for understanding experiences I had been interpreting in one way for years.
And the moment that framework changed, the power those old feelings had over me changed too.
That feels important.
At the very least, it has made me more cautious about neat explanations. More aware that familiar language can sometimes hide more than it reveals. More interested in asking what sits underneath the label rather than assuming the label is the answer.
Closing
For most of my career, I thought impostor syndrome was something I had to keep battling.
Now I think I was trying to explain myself with the wrong map.
Not completely wrong. Not useless. But incomplete.
And once I found a better way of understanding what was actually going on, a lot of that old feeling started to lose its grip.
That has not solved everything.
But it has made things make sense in a way they never quite did before.
And that, on its own, is a much bigger shift than I would have expected.