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— Written by Sarah Pruitt

Calling myself an independent scholar can feel natural. Usually, it is when I resemble what we imagine a scholar to be: hunched over my desk with several books open, following a footnote into an article, comparing two versions of a text, or trying to understand why an instruction in one manuscript differs so dramatically from the version that came before it.

But recently I was working at a local coffee shop when someone asked me what I was studying and I was surprised to find that suddenly the title scholar felt like an unearned and weighty burden.

Logically, this feeling is fallacious. My formal education is in biochemistry and molecular biology, and I spent several years pursuing a doctorate before eventually leaving the university for industry. I know what institutional scholarship looks like from the inside. I understand the expectations surrounding research, the importance of methodological rigor, and the uncomfortable experience of having your arguments challenged by experts in the field. But institutions also provide a certain kind of security. You have advisors to consult, colleagues to exchange ideas with, and guidelines for what good scholarship looks like. Your research, your qualifications, even your identity as a scholar exist within a framework that other people already recognize.

So why does this feeling persist? An anxiety that I am not permitted to research outside those systems? For an independent scholar, there is no doctoral committee evaluating my work or a university department guiding my investigations. I am the arbiter of deciding when an argument is developed enough to share it with a larger audience. While that independence is freeing, it also produces an uncomfortable amount of self-doubt.

I find myself wondering whether I have read enough. Whether my linguistic abilities are sufficient for the texts I want to work with. Whether someone with more formal training would look at an observation I find interesting and consider it embarrassingly elementary. I am acutely aware of the historians and scholars who have shaped this field, and of how much more they know about medieval and Renaissance history, manuscript studies, languages, and any number of other subjects than I do.

But lately I have started wondering whether that awareness is evidence that I am unqualified, or whether it reflects something more fundamental about what it means to pursue knowledge seriously.

In Plato’s Apology, Socrates recounts his attempt to understand the Delphic oracle’s claim that no one is wiser than he is. He seeks out politicians, poets, and craftspeople who appear to possess precisely the wisdom he lacks. Instead, he discovers a recurring problem: people who genuinely know something often mistake their competence in one area for wisdom in others. Socrates eventually concludes that whatever comparative wisdom he possesses lies in recognizing the limits of what he knows.

I’ve found this distinction useful when thinking about imposter syndrome. I can recognize the limitations of my knowledge without deciding that those limitations disqualify me from pursuing knowledge in the first place.

Of course, recognizing our ignorance does not automatically create competence. Socrates is not offering an excuse to dismiss expertise, and I certainly do not think enthusiasm can substitute for the years of training required to develop specialized skills. Knowing that I do not know medieval Latin well enough to answer a particular question does not somehow make me qualified to answer it.

But it does tell me what I need to learn next.

This helps crystallize the logical fallacy that is at the root of the imposter syndrome I feel. Expertise is not a requirement or pre-requisite for permission to investigate a subject. In many cases, I think expertise comes through the investigation itself – isn’t this the entire point of a PhD? To teach us to think critically? And surely an independent scholar pursues this same goal.

My study of magic and esotericism has forced me to confront this in a way my formal education rarely did. There is no committee waiting for my next chapter. There is no degree at the end of the research. There is no advisor who can tell me that I have read enough and am now permitted to have an opinion.

Sometimes—and, truthfully, more often than I would like to admit—that freedom makes me feel like a fraud, but I keep reminding myself that expertise is a result of the journey and not a title granted.

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