Excellence became my camouflage. You look exceptional but you’re still hiding.
Let me be as exact as I can about what I mean when I say this, because the easy reading is that high achievers are frauds, and that is not what I mean at all.
I mean something more specific and more interesting, and I have been living with it long enough to describe it from the inside.
The day the Mwangaza Scholarship was announced at Moi University School of Medicine, my name was called and I walked to the front of the hall, and the applause was real and the scholarship was real and I had genuinely earned both. But walking back to my seat, something was also real that the applause did not touch: the boy from Sengera who had been called ekerentane, the unwanted child, was still in the room. He was sitting in the back, observing the applause with a clinical detachment that scholarships could not dislodge. He was thinking: yes, but.
The yes, but never went away. The scholarships stacked up. The board certifications arrived. The fellowships were completed. The yes stayed yes. The but stayed but.
This is the psychology that Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes first described in 1978 when they studied high-achieving women and found a pattern they called the impostor phenomenon: a persistent internal experience of intellectual phoniness despite external evidence of success, characterized by a fear of being exposed as less capable than others believe (Clance and Imes 1978, Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0086006). Honesty Scale: Solid (5/5) for the existence of the phenomenon. Clance and Imes’ original sample was small and all-female, but the phenomenon has since been documented extensively across genders, professions, and cultures. The 2020 systematic review by Bravata and colleagues across sixty-two studies found prevalence estimates ranging from 9 to 82 percent, with higher rates in high-achievement contexts such as medicine and academia (Bravata et al. 2020, Journal of General Internal Medicine, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11606-019-05364-1).
What Clance and Imes named as a feeling of fraudulence, I want to name as something slightly different in mechanism: the use of excellence as a place to stand that keeps other people at a specific distance. Fraudulence implies that you believe your achievements are unearned. What I am describing is something you know the achievements are real and you also know that the achievements are functioning as a boundary between your public self and your private insufficiency.
The excellence is real. The hiding is also real. They coexist without contradiction.
I want to tell you about a specific kind of high achiever that I have met over and over again in clinical settings and in the work I do with physicians and executives. This person is never obviously struggling. They are extremely good at what they do. They are generous with their knowledge, reliable under pressure, and often the person that other people call when a situation becomes difficult. In the language of the frameworks I carry under the floorboards of this book: they are running the Achiever pattern at full capacity.
But invite them to be known rather than admired and a subtle shift occurs. The warmth remains. The engagement remains. What changes is the quality of presence. The person who was fully in the room when the subject was professional becomes slightly elsewhere when the subject becomes personal. Not absent. Not rude. Just at a certain careful remove, as though genuine intimacy represents a structural risk that excellence has been specifically constructed to manage.
Timothy Keller, writing about the biblical parable of the prodigal son, makes an observation about the elder brother that I found so precisely accurate that I have returned to it many times (Keller 2008, The Prodigal God, Dutton). Honesty Scale: this is literary theology, not clinical research, and I am using it as such. The elder brother, Keller argues, is not less lost than the younger brother who went to the far country and squandered everything. He is differently lost. He has never left home, and yet he has never arrived at the father’s table as a son rather than as an employee. His obedience is impeccable. His performance record is flawless. And when the father runs to meet the prodigal, the elder brother stands in the field, watching, and cannot cross the threshold because his entire relationship with the household has been built on performance rather than belonging.
The elder brother’s excellence was real. It was also his exile.
Henri Nouwen, in the meditation he wrote after years of sitting with Rembrandt’s painting of the return of the prodigal, locates the elder brother’s grief precisely: he has no felt access to the love that his own obedience was supposed to earn (Nouwen 1992, The Return of the Prodigal Son, Doubleday). The performance was flawless. The belonging never arrived. Because belonging was never going to arrive that way.
In the clinical register: I have seen this pattern in more attending physicians, fellowship directors, and senior administrators than I can count. Exceptional people. People whose work has genuinely helped other people. People who have earned every credential in their portfolio. People who, in a quiet moment, when the professional armor is briefly not required, will admit that they are not sure anyone knows them.
Not knows about them. Knows them.
The distinction is the chapter.
Knowing about a person is a function of their achievements. You can know about someone from their Wikipedia page, their CV, their publications, their interview answers. Knowing a person is a function of their presence, their difficulty, their particular irrationality, their specific grief, the jokes they make when they are nervous, the things they are afraid of, the questions they ask when no answer is required.
Excellence, operated as camouflage, produces a magnificent subject for the former and no surface at all for the latter. You are knowable in every direction except the directions that matter.
This is not a moral failing. I want to be clear about this. The child who learned that performing excellence kept them safe from the worst consequences of being genuinely seen was a child who made a completely sensible adaptation to the conditions of their early life. If being ordinary was dangerous, being extraordinary was protective. If being vulnerable invited harm, being excellent was armor.
The armor worked. The armor kept working far past the point where the original danger had passed. That is what armor does.
I want to say something about the Sengera wound here, because I think the autobiographical thread is relevant and not merely self-indulgent. The boy who was called ekerentane, the unwanted child, did not construct excellence as a philosophical position. He constructed it as a survival response to a specific threat. The threat was the possibility that the accusation was true, that there was something essentially insufficient about him that entitled the world to overlook him, dismiss him, or return him like a defective product.
The excellence was the rebuttal. Scholarship after scholarship. Degree after degree. Board certification after board certification. Each one an argument against the verdict. And the thing about arguing against a verdict through achievement is that the argument never ends, because the verdict was not rendered by a court that can be satisfied with evidence. It was rendered by a wound. And wounds do not accept credentials as evidence.
I am not the only person sitting with that wound. I have met the version of it in executives who grew up poor and became wealthy and still flinch when someone mentions their background. In immigrants who became full professors and still scan rooms for the moment when their accent will cost them authority. In women who became the most competent person in every organization they entered and still waited, in the back of the mind, for someone to notice they did not belong.
The wound changes shape depending on its origin. The response to the wound is remarkably consistent. Excel. Excel enough that the wound cannot be heard over the applause.
It cannot be heard. It is still there.
The Prodigal Winner runs to the far country of achievement the same way the biblical prodigal ran to the far country of excess. Both are running from the father’s house. Both believe, on some level, that what the father’s house requires of them is beyond what they can deliver as themselves. The original prodigal believed he would squander the inheritance. The Prodigal Winner believes they have to earn what was always freely given.
Neither of them is right. But the belief is the thing that keeps the running going.
The first R in the R.E.T.U.R.N. work is Recognition, and this is where it begins for the high achiever who has been using excellence as camouflage: the recognition that the applause is real and the hiding is also real, and that these two things have been living in the same house without ever being in the same room. The recognition is not a solution. It is a beginning. The beginning is enough for today.
In Ekegusii, the language I grew up speaking in Sengera, the verb irana means to return. Not to retreat. To return. It carries the specific connotation of going back to something that was always yours, something that did not require earning, something you moved away from and can now move toward. The word I have carried into everything I do with high achievers, the work I call identity midwifery because I am present when the real self is being born into acknowledgment rather than delivering someone else’s diagnosis of who they should be, is irana. The recognition of the chapter is the first movement of the return.
The R.E.T.U.R.N. work begins here, with recognition: the recognition that what looks like pride in achievement may be functioning, in significant part, as a sophisticated barrier to the specific kind of contact that the self actually needs to feel less alone.
You do not need to dismantle the excellence. The excellence is real. You need to notice what the excellence has been covering, and begin to ask, in very small doses at first, whether the covered thing might be allowed occasional access to air.
Let me be specific about what the covered thing tends to be, in the high achievers I have worked with most closely. It is rarely shame in the obvious sense. It is rarely a secret that, if disclosed, would end careers or relationships. The covered thing is almost always simpler and more essential than that. It is usually one of these: uncertainty, exhaustion, or need.
Uncertainty: the sense that for all the accomplishment, the person does not fully know what they are doing or whether it is the right thing to be doing. This is not incompetence. It is the honest recognition that expertise has limits and that many of the questions worth asking do not have expert answers. The excellence covers this uncertainty because uncertainty in a high performer tends to be read as inadequacy rather than as wisdom.
Exhaustion: not burnout exactly, but the genuine physical and emotional tiredness of a person who has been performing at a high level for a long time and has not been allowed, by the logic of the performance, to admit it. The excellence covers this because admission of tiredness in a high performer is read, by the performer and often by the people around them, as a request to step down rather than as a normal human need.
Need: the desire to receive care, support, or simple acknowledgment that is not predicated on performance. The desire to matter to someone for reasons that have nothing to do with what you produce. The excellence covers this most thoroughly of all, because the need is the thing the ekerentane wound was created around, and the excellence was specifically constructed to make the need unnecessary. If you are excellent enough, the theory goes, you will not need to ask.
You will always need to ask. That is not a character flaw. That is what it means to be a person.
If you cannot be seen, no one can see what is missing.
Excellence is the most respectable form of hiding.
A Mirror
When someone praises your work, what is your first internal response? Name it exactly, including any component that is not simply satisfaction. (Listening for: the yes, but, the flinch before acceptance, the internal qualification that diminishes the external praise. These are the hallmarks of the phenomenon.)
Is there a version of you that only the work gets to see? What does that version feel, know, or believe that your public self does not publicly carry? (Listening for: the gap between the professional self and the private self. The size of that gap is the size of the camouflage.)
Name something true about you that your excellence does not communicate, and that you have not told a single person in your professional life. (Listening for: the specific hidden thing. The more specific the answer, the more the question has landed.)
What would you lose if you were known more completely, beyond your achievements? What do you believe would happen? (Listening for: the fear that drives the concealment. Very often it is not fear of judgment but fear of disappearance, the belief that without the excellence, there is nothing there to be known.)
Has excellence ever protected you from something you actually needed to experience? Name the thing it protected you from. (Listening for: the grief that the armor prevented. The intimacy declined. The feedback that did not arrive because the performance was too smooth to invite it.) ---
Letter from Dr. Job
Subject: The thing your excellence hides
I know what you have built. I have been building something similar since I was a boy in Sengera who learned that being exceptional made you easier to keep.
The work is real. I believe that. The skill is real. The care you bring to it is real.
But somewhere underneath the excellence, there is a person who has not been fully introduced. Not because you are concealing anything shameful. Because the excellence got so good at representing you that it became easier to let it do all the talking.
What the excellence cannot say is: I am also uncertain. I am also tired. I am also carrying something I have not yet put down. I also need to be known by more than what I produce.
This is not weakness. This is the part of you that makes the rest of you make sense. The excellence needs this person. The excellence was built by this person. Let them be in the room together.
You are more than what you have accomplished. That is not a comfort phrase. It is a clinical finding.
— Job