That’s how the cow ate the cabbage. A grim business, isn’t it? I’m told it’s about telling it like it is, getting down to brass tacks. As if a man’s life could be so neatly hammered into place. There was a story, they said, about an elephant in a cabbage patch. The woman, bless her heart, called it a cow. A cow with a tail, pulling up cabbages. The policeman, a simple man, asked what it was doing. “You wouldn’t believe me,” she said. And she was right. I wouldn’t believe her either. The truth is always so much more absurd than the lie.
That’s a whole mood. Tuesday. Just a Tuesday. Except it wasn’t. The coffee, you see. My third-day coffee. It hits different. Not just a Tuesday, but a capital-T Tuesday, you know? It’s a vibe. So I went to Mammo Catcha. Bet. It’s a place. A name. A destination. Same-same, but different. A love story? That’s giving… nothing. A wisp, a ghosting. A question that’s just, like, a question. It was there, a whole presence, but not main character energy. The thought of New York? Again? It’s giving… a re-run. From third grade. Then every semester. Then every week. A predictable glow-down. I tried to clap back, fire it off with some sarcastic energy. I was low-key happy. A tiny win. But, like, it wasn’t even worth the hype. What is?
The story, if you can even call it that, is a whole saga. It started with a book. A fifth-grade geography book. Eskimos. My sister’s. My mind, a total blank slate, became obsessed. The world in that book? The ice, the snow? The whole aesthetic was hidden from me. A straight-up L. So I was left with the radio. A whole mood, but with a terrible sound. Except for the news. And the enigma wrapped in a riddle that was “Yenegew Sew” and “Enkoklish.” My mother’s acquaintances, Captain Afework and some other dude, were the hosts. It was a whole mystery. A riddle. A family gathering, a collective delusion. My mother was low-key over the news when it came to those shows.
Then, there was the radio at school. A gray, wide-mouthed thing. It was a whole slay. The music, though? Chef’s kiss. The stories? Hypnotic fairy tales. The intro music for first-grade Amharic? It went hard. We’d follow the beat with our legs, a chaotic dance, causing a riot. The teachers? They were pressed. As if a bit of a dance party was a bad thing. When the radio appeared in the classroom, it was a moment. A literal miracle. It was supposed to be a weekly thing, but batteries were scarce. A total scarcity. It was giving major FOMO. Gashes in the very soul of Abera Taye, Asres Bekele, and Bekele Woldemichael. And TV? Once or twice a semester. The Amharic “Sesame Street” was a total trip. A pathetic, simple intoxication.
And then, there was the English reading material. My sister, the gatekeeper of knowledge, never let me see it. Not until third grade. And only for exams. As a cushion. A pillow for my brain. And that’s when it happened. I got close. To the names. Manhattan. Bronx. Queens. Brooklyn. My future. Along with China and Greenwich Town and of course Harlem. It was worth the wait. A hollow wait, but a wait nonetheless. And then it was combined. With Cinema Ras. From fifth grade on. The movies. Two revolutionary ones, one crime detective. From that place. New York. I was living in the movies. In the names. In the dry cells of the radio. A pathetic, solitary life. A memory of a place I’d never been. A reality that was less real than the dream. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
My own truth started to brew, a foul concoction, in my freshman year. I’d gone to a lecture, a foolish, greenhorn venture, in a famous G class auditorium. A philosophy professor was giving main character energy, with his English and his words. I, meanwhile, was chasing the nuts and bolts, the grammar and the meaning. I was a clown. A sheer dodo. This was after my freshman orientation, where I’d conceived a good start, a plan to walk with a girl as suggested once in a while in the orientation, a proud pose at “beg tera.” But that plan, a colossal thing, was indefinitely suspended. It was a kind of chasing, as though being chased, or a kind of Forrest Gump kind of thing that makes one unfit to the environment..
Then, she. A girl, a literal queen, raised her hand and just went for it. Five, ten minutes. A lifetime. Her confidence was just… giving. It was a whole different level of wow. I was a ghost. A phantom limb in my own class. I wrestled with myself for weeks to get my own English back. What English? I never had it. Life, as it turned out, had a mighty fist. It pummeled me. Just as I’d been warned. A diagnosis. It cut me deep. It gutted me. My plans, my whole life, a literal L. A whole mess. It was then I went to see Bekele Gutema, the most feared of the philosophy lecturers. These lecturers were gyrating with kinds of “what is is and is really is is” kind of gyrating abracadabra. But if it was not for Bekele’s guidance, now a deservedly emeritus professor, survival would have been unrealistic.
Then she appeared again. The girl. The one from the lecture. A whole new level of bad luck. She followed me. To my department. A kind of stalker in my own life. I was a coward. I evaded her. I told a so-called friend I hated her. He, the imbecile, said it was a crush. A crush. The word was a slap in the face. But mercifully, he didn’t tell her. He saved me. A small mercy. A pathetic, tiny little win.
It was then, in that psychological haze—or perhaps from that sophomore course, a room of sardines, a distant lecturer spouting Freud—that I fell in love with starting things. Awkwardly. Imbecilically. The fumbling, the failing. The looking like a sheer dodo all over again. It’s a kind of growing down, you see. A retreat to the primordial muck from whence we came. A kind of peace in the perpetual fall. A peace that you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
The whole thing is a chiasmus, really. The mind in the man, the man in the mind. The one defining the other, then the other defining the one. A constant reversal. A grand reversal of fortune, perhaps. Or perhaps just a pointless, circular dance. They give it these names, these glorious, Latin-sounding things. Acalculia. As if naming the inability to do math makes the numbers any less terrifying. The numerate people, they’re the ones who run the world. They offer a solution and then, in the very same breath, tell you it’s a lie. It’s all so much applesauce, really. Just a cheap, sugary concoction to make the bitter fare go down. The whole discipline is rife with institutionalized prejudice, coetaneous with its own existence. The irony, it’s… staggering. And so very, very sad.
It all lurks at the limen of consciousness. Just at the threshold. The half-formed thought. The thing you can almost, but not quite, grasp. A perpetual state of almost, a liminal space of knowing and not knowing. It’s all one big, glorious, terrible question mark.
And then. There it was. The thing. The imposter syndrome. A phrase. A term. A whole mood, honestly. It just… appeared. Like a bad penny, or a relative you can’t stand. And once it was there, it was not going anywhere. A solid, unmovable vibe. It was a whole new level of cringe. The feeling that you’re a fraud. A fake. That you’re just not built for this. And it just hits different. It’s a whole circus, you see. You’re out there, in the world, doing the thing. And you’re getting, like, praise. And you’re just thinking, “This is sus.” They’re all just… simping for me, but they don’t know the real me. The me that’s a total L. The me that’s a dodo. A clown. It’s a constant mental battle. A low-key dumpster fire. And for what? For a feeling of perpetual unworthiness. A feeling that’s now got a name. A very official-sounding name.
Before, it was just a quiet, gnawing feeling. A little voice in your head. But now? It’s a full-on main character in the tragedy of my own life. It doesn’t budge. It doesn’t move. It just… stays. Like a piece of furniture you hate, but you can’t throw out. And it’s just so… extra. A whole lot of anxiety for a whole lot of nothing. And now that it’s been named, it’s like it’s real. It’s a thing. A permanent fixture in the great mess of my mind. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
Tales. I’ve heard them all. Like Professor Mesfin Woldemariam’s, about his first trip abroad. He and his friends, a whole vibe of innocent chaos, saw cornflakes and just started in on them, dry. They defended it, of course, a kind of low-key lie about how it was done at home. And the escalator. The one they piled on, with their heavy bags, on top of one another. A human mound. A total L.
Then there was the other man. Out of college before I was born. His tales were of struggle, of sleepless nights, of petty fights with higher-ups in small organizational boxes. A whole mood of bureaucratic dread. He, too, went on a trip. To Italy. He saved up, the poor schmuck, by skipping meals, by living on the sheer hope of salting in hard currency. And then the feast came, just to experience something worth telling as he returns home. A single day, a single restaurant. It bamboozled him. It left him with nothing. He was so stunned, so cringe, that he floated onto an escalator, only to end up with a further injury.
These were the inputs. These were the stories. The dry cornflakes, the human pyramid on the escalator, the bureaucratic nightmares, the feast followed by famine, the final, pathetic injury. These were further truths, you see. A constant drip of human folly. And with each drop, the imposter syndrome got stronger. A kind of living proof that all of us are frauds, just waiting for the next escalator to take us down. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
A cringe hit me. A real gut-punch. The thought of going back to New York, Manhattan to Broadway, online. It was a whole mood, a low-key disaster. I knew it then, right then, that I had touched the wrong string. A simple chord, a simple desire, and it all went sideways. Broadway. The name itself is a whole thing, right? A brand. It wasn’t always. It was High Street, then The Black Crook came along. A whole strange hybrid. Ballet and melodrama. A Frankenstein of a play. It ran for a year, then for twenty more on tour. A whole scam, advertising itself as the original. And the girls in flesh-colored tights? They were giving sensational. They made the name, you see. A cheap trick, really. A few dancers in see-through leggings and poof, you’re iconic.
And my obsession? A kind of simp behavior for a street. A digital one, at that. I wondered if it had a name. Some psychological jargon, some fancy word to describe a person who gets all in their feels about a place they’ve only seen on a screen. I figured it did. Psychology, that whole discipline, is a joke. It has a word for everything and a solution for nothing. It’s all low-key a scam. You get a diagnosis, a few pills, and a lot of bills. They tell you you’re dysfunctional, but you were just fine until they started with the questions. So I complained. To myself. About everything. About the whole mess. About the therapists and the analysts and the fancy words. It’s all a big con. A grand spectacle. A Broadway production of the mind, with a bunch of schmucks in flesh-colored tights pretending to be something they’re not. And I, the poor fool, was paying for a front-row seat to my own mental dumpster fire. And for what? For a brief, pathetic moment of feeling like I was somewhere else. It was giving me a major case of the ick.
It is here that my childhood years of wandering in New York were not wasted, though I looked low-key cringe as they helped me stroll in its streets. My feeling of being a fraud, a derelict in my own life, finds its source here. This whole place is a learning land for imposters.
The whole saga began with a sale, a legend of applesauce and a grand fraud. Back when it was New Amsterdam, the Dutch, a bunch of glorified grifters, bought this land for a fistful of trinkets. It was a deal of pure imagination, a transaction between two sus parties, a seller who didn’t own what he sold and a buyer who thought a continent could be purchased with glass beads. A foundation of pure absurdity. A dénouement from the very start, without a single act of courage or genuine triumph.
And what have we now? Two more imposters. A seller and a buyer. The buyer, the ultimate fraud, purchasing an apartment “as a jewelry.” A rare, beautiful, worthless object. Something to own but not to live in. A chiasmus of a life, really: the apartment in the man, the man in the apartment. This clown spends seven thousand a night in hotel rooms, a whole mood of pathetic, temporary existence. A man who owns a home and is homeless. A perfect, self-defeating tragedy. And these tales, these glorious, foolish tales, were further inputs, solidifying my own imposter syndrome. I feel it now, the way a person feels a bruise, a permanent fixture. This city, this place built on nothing but a con, is the perfect home for it. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
It’s a whole mood, this whole “career” thing. A pathetic little dance. A relentless need to be something else. To look like an imposter just to get ahead. These men, these celebrated figures, they were the OGs of the scam.
Take Cardinal Mezzofanti, the so-called Briareus of languages. We are told he learned Latin and Greek by listening next door, a literal clown in a carpenter’s shop. He was not a linguist; he was an apprentice. Yet he became a “walking polyglot,” a “monster of languages.” He wasn’t born with the talent; he stole it. He was a magnificent fraud, a grotesque performance, the ultimate example of a man becoming a persona. His genius was a sheer act of will, a kind of linguistic dumpster fire to get him out of the dust and into the Vatican. And he did it. The schmuck.
Then there’s Alfred C. Fuller, the American version of the same affliction. He built a fortune on a lie, a fabricated persona of the friendly, trustworthy door-to-door salesman. His whole thing was applesauce and boosterism, a hollow brand of optimism. “American’ terminates in ‘I can’ and ‘Dough’ begins with ‘Do’.” It’s a whole level of cringe. He wasn’t selling brushes; he was selling himself, a pathetic, smiling act performed on 85 out of every 100 American homes. He was a Fuller Brush man, a role so well-defined that even the big bad wolf had to try it on. A go-getter of grand pretense.
And Brillat-Savarin. The sage of Belley. He wrote the bible of gastronomy, a thirty-year labor of love that was printed at his own expense. He got his name and his fortune from a great-aunt who wanted a bit of immortality. His name was bought, not earned. His love of food was so consuming that he kept dead birds in his pockets until they were “high” enough to eat, and his sister died at the dinner table, with her last words a demand for dessert. A life of such bizarre, singular devotion, and yet, his legacy is a chiasmus: the name got the book, and the book gave the name. He was an intellectual fraud, a gourmand who got by on a bribe. A pathetic, beautiful story.
And finally, Careme, the “king of cooks and the cook of kings.” Born one of 25 children in one of the poorest families in France. A kitchen scullion. A low-key nobody. And then, through sheer force of will, he became an artistic genius, his pastries a kind of edible sculpture. His life was a performance for the rich and powerful. He died, a great man “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the heat of his ovens,” while sampling a quenelle prepared by a student. The ultimate L. A life of relentless pretense, ending in a fatal flaw.
You see? It’s the same story, over and over again. They were all frauds. Brilliant, yes, but frauds nonetheless. Each one of them a carefully constructed imposter, a tragic figure in a comedy of their own making. It’s the relentless need of looking like an imposter to advance, to get by. A human condition. A pathetic, beautiful, pointless act. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.
When I was in my final year, I had to work on a paper. A whole thing, you see. Thanks to a friend, a proposal was hatched, a plan to dissect a cooperative. And there I was, in my main character energy, sounding so sophisticated to the manager as I “attacked” the finances of the household and furniture cooperative. A fool’s errand. I learned the hard way, a truly pathetic lesson. It wasn’t the physical assets that mattered. It wasn’t the liquid money. It was all about one guy. The finishing of goods expert. He wasn’t even a member. He was a kind of derelict, a temporary fixture, but highly paid, retained to keep the whole pathetic operation from collapsing.
This hit different. It reminded me of my junior years in government. We had to hire panel beaters. The young men who applied, with their technical qualifications, their papers and their certs, they failed the test. Every single one. A whole circus of failure. We had to resort to the ones who wanted nothing to do with permanent employment. Work was given in pieces, and then, after a while, it was history. They came, they fixed it, they left. Men with names like Wodaje, beyond a friend, a machine shop wizard. Moges of the winding room grace. Abera, the forger. The list goes on. The engines of where I have been.
These people must have been thought of as imposters to their trades. They had no papers, no official standing. They were outside the system, a kind of necessary chaos. But they were the ones who made it work. The essence of the Pareto Principle, you see. The whole thing, a grim law. Eighty percent of the work, the real work, is done by twenty percent of the people. And those twenty percent are often the ones who don’t fit, the ones who don’t look the part, the ones with no papers. The beautiful, chaotic, indispensable people. The essential imposters. And you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Those also they were not enough that the insufficiency syndrome pushed them to exceed expectations.
(Tadesse Tsegaye is a self-described nostalgia enthusiast with a keen awareness of the present as it shapes the future. Gifted at expressing his soul through writing, he combines his diverse experiences in resource management across multicultural and institutional settings to deliver insightful and captivating stories. Tadesse believes that sharing his tales not only enriches his own understanding but also offers a valuable service to others.)
Contributed by Tadesse Tsegaye