David Zahl - Low Anthropology: The Unlikely Key to a Gracious View of Others (and Yourself)

I FEEL LIKE EVERYONE ELSE GOT SOME MANUAL when they turned twenty-five, and I was sick that day, Josh said.

What kind of manual? I asked.

He gave me a weary look. You know, a guide to adult lifewith instructions on mortgages and insurance policies and dry cleaning and long-term relationships and raising kids who dont hate you.

Oh, that manual, I responded. I think I let your brother borrow mine.

Josh smiled, but I could tell he was being serious. Like me, he was in the trenches of the days-are-long-but-years-are-short stage of midlife. Hed had a rough go of it lately, losing a job hed long lobbied for just as his daughter decided to dial up the teenage rebellion to eleven. I knew his marriage had been struggling as a result, and he almost never got out anymore.

It didnt help that his younger brother was apparently killing it in the city as a commercial real-estate broker. Most of Joshs and my interactions these days had been limited to sending his brothers Instagram posts back and forth, trying to poke enough fun not to sound too jealous. Oh, to be young, single, and preternaturally photogenic.

Just tell me Im not the only one whos making it up as he goes, he said.

He definitely is not. Id heard some version of Joshs refrain hundreds of times, sometimes from my own mouth. Earlier that day, in fact, in my capacity as a staff member at our local church, Id gotten an email from a college student named Addie who felt like she was the only person in her pre-med program hanging on for dear life. It just seems to come so easily for everyone else, she said. I honestly dont know why they let me in.

I was late for coffee with Josh, so I typed her a quick message and attached an article on the pressure of perfection that I thought might shed some light. The piece, published in the New York Times a few years prior, seeks to account for the fast-rising levels of mental-health emergencies on college campuses. At one point it cites Gregory T. Eells, then-director of counseling and psychological services at Cornell University. Eells mentions hearing sentiments like Addies from other students with alarming frequencythis sense that everyone else is happy and not struggling. His go-to response is to inform them that the struggles are more widespread: I walk around and think, That ones gone to the hospital. That person has an eating disorder. That student just went on antidepressants. As a therapist, I know that nobody is as happy or as grown-up as they seem on the outside.

You dont have to be a college student or a parent of teenagers to experience what Josh and Addie are describing. They are both in the throes of imposter syndrome, the nagging sense that you dont belong, that its only a matter of time before the house of cards comes crashing down.

After twenty years in the people professionand twenty before that growing up in the house of a pastorIm fairly certain this syndrome is universal. Its less of a syndrome and more of a condition, best expressed in that timeless cartoon of a crowded street abuzz with people headed in different directions, all sharing the same thought balloon: All these people really seem to have it together, and I still have no idea whats going on. Can you relate?