Impostor syndrome

After JKR, here's Kathleen Stock on Nicole Sturgeon's ridiculous book:

In the 2010s it was commonplace to hear that such-and-such a prominent woman had “imposter syndrome” — meaning she went through life irrationally feeling as if she was about to be unmasked as a fraud. It seems that the disease goes all the way up to national leaders. In Nicola Sturgeon’s autobiography, Frankly, published yesterday, she describes suffering from it too. “The better I did, the more of an imposter I felt, and the greater the fear of being ‘found out’,” she writes.

Cut to the end.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

Ouch.