How I Deal with Imposter Syndrome in a Family of Over-Achievers

Chelsea Raine
6 min readDec 13, 2019

And how the the movie The Breakfast Club helped me finally accept myself, flaws and all.

Photo by Brandon Hoogenboom on Unsplash

I have a confession to make. I recently realized that I have spent most of my life feeling quite ungrateful for my larger than life family. Not that I don’t love my three older sisters, younger brother, and all of their kids and spouses that have allowed our family to expand over the decades.

We’ve always been a loud family, though. Like The Breakfast Club, each of us had our own unique personality when we were kids. In the movie there was the brainy kid, the athlete, the basket case, the princess and the criminal.

As for my siblings, there was the cheerleader, the scientist, the christian, and then my stepbrother, the cowboy.

For myself, I never seemed to fit into any label. If I could have related to any of the characters in the movie, it would have been the basket case, played to perfection by Ally Sheedy.

But what are labels really? They are symbols that define us, but we are so much more complex than that. I think if I had been appropriately labeled as a teenager I would have been called Avant Garde. I never did fit into…

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Chelsea Raine
Chelsea Raine

Written by Chelsea Raine

Just a writer in search of the proverbial magic carpet ride, one word at a time