An anecdote about Neil Armstrong pops up on the internet from time to time. But no one knew how real this was. But now we know…
According to the anecdote attributed to author Neil Gaiman, which is often posted as a Tumblr screenshot, Gaiman was at a gathering of artists, scientists, writers, and other notable celebrities. While in the meeting, which lasted for several days, he felt that he did not have enough success to take his place among these other famous names. The author states: “I felt that they would always understand that I was unfit to be there among these people who had really done something.”
This feeling is what’s commonly known as “the impostor syndrome”. Although not considered a diagnosable condition (like other syndromes), the term was first coined in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes.
“The term impostor phenomenon is used to denote the inner experience of intellectual frauds that seem particularly common and intense among a select sample of particularly successful women,” the psychologists write in their article, adding, “The myriad achievements that might be expected to provide copious object evidence of superior intellectual functioning do not seem to affect the belief of the fraudulent. looks.”
The syndrome is not due to external factors. Feeling like a cheater doesn’t make a person a cheater. Gaiman, himself a respected writer, felt this a lot at the meeting, anecdotally. Then he met a participant who changed his perspective on events.
“On my second or third night there, I was standing in the back of the hall when there was a musical entertainment, and I was talking about a lot of things, including our common name, with a very nice, kind old gentleman,” Gaiman wrote on his blog, which confirmed the anecdote as true and ended the debate. I started talking. That man was Neil Armstorng…” The article goes like this: “Then he pointed at the people in the hall and I look at all these people and think, what am I doing here? They’ve done great things. I went where I was sent. So I said ‘Yes’. But you were the first person to go to the Moon. I think it means something.’”
So, even the first person to set foot on the Moon after an incredibly long and grueling selection process can feel that way. After the encounter, Gaiman says he felt so much better: “Because if even Neil Armstrong felt like a fraud, maybe everybody did. Maybe there weren’t any big names, there were just people who had worked hard but were also lucky and a little bit out of their depths, we all tried our best. We’re doing our best, which is really all we can hope for.”
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