Every Halloween party has that one moment. You walk in, look around, and immediately decide everyone else's costume is better than yours. More effort. More clever. More right.
Work has the same party. It just runs all year.
The costume I wore for years
For a long time in tech, I was the only woman in a lot of rooms. Planning meetings. Vendor calls. Booth teardowns at midnight. I got very good at being "one of the boys." Same jokes, same pace, same refusal to look tired.
I don't regret it. A lot of it is just who I am. I'm direct, I like a good roast, and I've never needed a room to be gentle with me.
But some of it was a costume. And I didn't realize how heavy it was until I noticed how much energy I spent keeping it on.
The thing nobody tells you about imposter syndrome
Imposter syndrome usually gets explained like this: you're qualified, but you feel like a fraud, and any minute now someone will find out.
Here's the part that took me years to figure out. Everyone else in that room is wearing a costume too.
The engineer who never asks questions is wearing one. The VP who answers everything in under three seconds is wearing one. The new hire who says "totally, makes sense" is wearing one. Confidence at work is very often a well tailored outfit over the same nerves you have.
You're comparing your insides to everyone else's costume. That's not a fair contest. It never was.
Why women feel the costume more
This part isn't about anyone being fragile. It's about math.
When you're one of a few women in a technical room, you're not just representing yourself. People quietly treat you as a sample size. Speak up too much and you're a lot. Speak up too little and you're not leadership material. Get one detail wrong and somehow it says something about all of us.
So we overprepare. We double check the slide nobody else double checked. We pick the costume that seems safest for the room, and then we wonder why we feel like imposters in it.
The feeling is real. The conclusion is wrong. Feeling like an imposter usually means you're paying attention, not that you don't belong.
How I take the costume off, a little at a time
I'm not going to tell you to "just be authentic." That advice is easy to give and expensive to follow. Here's what's actually worked for me.
Keep the parts that are you. If you love being direct, stay direct. If you're funny, be funny. The goal isn't to swap one costume for another. It's to figure out which parts were armor and which parts were always yours.
Ask the question. The one everyone in the meeting is quietly wondering about. Half the time someone thanks you afterward. The other half, you learn something.
Keep receipts on yourself. When the doubt gets loud, look at what you actually did. Results don't have imposter syndrome.
Find the other people at the party. Every company has a few people who see through the costumes too. Find them. A short text that says "was that meeting as weird as I thought?" is worth more than any leadership book.
Say "I don't know yet." Three words that feel terrifying the first time and freeing every time after.
The best costume is the one you can breathe in
You don't have to show up to work unmasked. Nobody does. Some armor is smart, especially in rooms that haven't earned your trust yet.
But you should be able to take a deep breath in whatever you're wearing. And you should know that the person across the table, the one who looks like they've got it all figured out, is probably standing at the same party, wondering if anyone can tell.
Spoiler: nobody can. Everyone's too busy worrying about their own costume.
What's the costume you wore at work the longest? I'll go first. Mine came with steel toe boots and a very convincing "no, I'm not tired."