According to his son (Michael Parkinson suffered from ‘impostor syndrome’, son says, 25 August), Michael Parkinson “struggled with insecurity and constantly questioning himself”. How I sympathise. I share the same background as Michael, brought up in a council house in a South Yorkshire mining village and educated at the local grammar school. I recall frequently encountering what I call the “not-for-the-likes-of-us-syndrome” which must have had a powerful influence on our development.
I remember feeling sad that this attitude was so prevalent among people who had every reason to be proud of their lives. Such a contrast to the confident air of entitlement that shocked me when I arrived in Cambridge (the first person in my family to go to university). I spent the first term convinced that there had been some mistake letting me in, but I got a first. I went on to obtain a PhD and spent a career as an academic in a medical school.
Now I am over 80, and still feel like an impostor waiting to be found out, as though any day soon I’ll be rumbled.
Christine Kent
Southwell, Nottinghamshire
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