Unpacking Imposter Syndrome on Giant Mountain

Photo by Dustin Riehl

Breathless and tired, I paused on the rocky landing and turned to look at my progress. In the distance I could see the endless peaks that set the stunning scene of the Adirondack Mountains. This was my third full ADK high peak, having previously summited Cascade and Phelps Mountains on separate occasions the year before. Although I came with a friend this time, I have a painfully slow pace due to knee issues and mediocre endurance, so I told him to go ahead of me. I often feel embarrassed to hike with others due to my slower-than-average pace, but he was kind about it.

I have had issues with my knees since high school, but only when I became an avid hiker did they start to really show signs of trouble. Some friends offer their opinions, expressing that weight-loss may alleviate my knee pain. While I understand the thought processes, I also recognize that the issues I experience require surgery, and even after losing almost a hundred pounds over the last ten years, the pain is only getting worse. Regardless, I am a stubborn person. So, instead of doing anything about this pain, I just kept going on more and more difficult hikes.

That is how I found myself sobbing toward the top of Giant Mountain and wondering if I had made a mistake. As an experienced hiker I was otherwise prepared for the climb, so I was shocked at the level of pain I was in this time, as I made it to the top of the mountain.

At one point a kind stranger stopped to ask if I was injured. "No, just my ego," I told him. We chuckled, and after I explained that I would be fine, I just had some knee pain, he gifted me a couple ibuprofen tablets and went on his way. I will forever be grateful for the type of strangers who help just to help. It's a reminder that regardless of our stories, we're all just trying to get up the mountain.

I had already told my hiking buddy to descend the mountain without me, head back to camp, and come pick me up later. I was going to take my time getting down.

As my ruminating thoughts spiraled, I began to tell myself that maybe I didn't belong here anymore. This was for a certain type of hiker, and I could never be her. Despite having already done a couple of peaks, among countless other hikes of varied difficulty level, and having made it this far, I still felt like a fraud.

I don't know where I learned the "I don't quite fit" narrative. Maybe it is something women absorb as we grow up in a world that constantly tells us we have to be more. Maybe it comes from a place of insecurity. There have been few spaces in which I have felt I've belonged over the years. I never suspected the forest would become one of them.

I sat on a large rock collecting myself, knowing I had hours ahead of me to get back to the trailhead. I had started hiking a few years back when I was trying to find something active to do that wasn't a sport. I'm uncoordinated, and frankly bad at almost everything. That isn't just me being hard on myself. Play a round of pickleball or volleyball with me and you will see what I mean. I'm even bad at cornhole.

Earlier that year I began a PhD program, to which I thought I would never be accepted. If I have one thing, it's a lot of nerve. So, I applied anyway, anticipating rejection but hoping for the best. When I got in, I thought: did they mix up my application with someone else's? Was this an admissions error? I thought this even more when I began classes. My classmates were brilliant! They were already teaching, and they all had MA degrees, whereas I do not teach, and have a creative writing background and an MFA. I constantly compared myself to my classmates, finding any difference as a potential shortcoming, and unsure if I was cut out for this kind of intensive research (even though I loved it). I came to the wilderness to get a break from my incessant imposter-syndrome thoughts, yet here I sat on the trail allowing the same I-don't-belong-here emotions to fester inside me.

I permitted myself to feel what I was feeling, but once I recognized that this, too, was a sort of imposter syndrome, I pushed myself off that rock, grabbed my hiking poles, and climbed down that mountain. I learned in undergraduate school that when applying for jobs, men are much more likely than women to apply for jobs they aren't qualified for. That means one of two things: some men believe they're more qualified than they really are, or they're confident enough to try anyway even if they know they aren't qualified. But women are less likely to submit the application if they suspect they aren’t 100% qualified.

What made me chuckle that day, thinking about this as I side-stepped down steep inclines and scrambled over boulders, is that this fact had always pissed me off as a woman. In fact, I think it was what gave me the last push to submit that PhD application that I thought might be rejected. Yet being here, in this moment, having already accomplished the thing, or being in the midst of accomplishing the thing, I was still telling myself I wasn't good enough, or that I didn't belong. Not just with the mountain, but with the PhD program. It may be from societal conditioning, low self-esteem, or a combination of the two, but it was time to change the narrative for myself. 

As the sun went down and I still had a couple of miles left on the trail, I fixed my headlamp, guzzled the last of my water, and pushed forward. I veered off trail to use the “facilities." However, I was exhausted and got turned around in the darkness. I struggled to find the trail again with limited light. There were no longer other hikers, because I was the last down the mountain that evening. Classic. Now, I was slightly lost, off trail, in the dark, and losing steam pretty quickly. I heard an animal to my left, and it sounded huge, crashing along in the distance. A deer, I told myself. Just a deer. I made some noises to scare it away. It got closer for a few moments. My intrusive thoughts envisioned a bear mulling me off trail and my body being found the next day just a mile from the trailhead. Not a very cool way to go out, I pouted. Whatever the animal was, I felt it right next to me. But I never saw it. I just heard the loud rustling and occasional grunting and sniffing noises. Totally a deer, I gulped. The adrenaline was making it even more difficult for me to focus on where the trail might be.

As I desperately searched, I heard someone shout my name from far below. It was a man's voice. "Ashley!" He called. I stopped and listened. "Ashley!" This time I was positive it was my name. I shouted back, "Yeah!" It must have been my buddy seeing how far up the trail I was. Luckily, his voice led me right back to the trail, and I was grateful that he shouted out to me in that moment of panic. "Thank you!" He shouted back, as if to say he just needed confirmation that I was alright.

I hurried down the rest of the way to the trail head. I had done it. My pace was slower than everyone else. I got a little turned around. I almost encountered a "deer". But I finished the mountain all the same. I knew that if someone were to tell me I didn't belong here, I could tell them they are wrong. I don't need my journey to look like yours to be valid. I reminded myself this, because my only critic on the trail that day was me.

When I got to the road I saw my friend's car parked down the road a bit, and I hurried to him. He had a pizza waiting for me, so it was clear that he was sent from the gods. "Were you calling out to see if I was getting close?" I asked him as we drove back to camp.

"What do you mean?" He asked.

"Weren't you shouting my name? I shouted back and you responded." I said.

"No, I just pulled up a few seconds ago," he explained.

Nobody else on that trail knew my name. Also, the last person on the trail had passed me over an hour prior. I am a skeptic when it comes to the supernatural or divine intervention, so I dismissed those ideas about what I had heard. I wondered if I was so exhausted and desperate to find my way that I imagined it. The mind can play incredible tricks sometimes.

What was most important was that I found my way (and didn't get nibbled by a bear)! I went back to camp to rest, and despite the knee pain, I was already dreaming of my next mountain. Later that summer I went on to apply for candidacy in my PhD Program, and successfully accomplished it. I often think about the voice calling me back to the trail in the Adirondacks as a sort of metaphor for my inner pep-talk voice that is always redirecting me. It’s easy to sit on a rock and cry about not being good enough, even if you’ve already accomplished the hard parts. It’s easy to compare yourself to other people who may be on the same trail but entirely different journeys. What isn’t easy is changing the story—telling yourself you’ve already made it, and you do belong here. You are the only one who gets to decide that, after all.

AE