Nobody tells you about the silence.
They tell us about the workload. They warn us about the deadlines, the readings that pile up faster than we can get through them, the way our social lives quietly fade until they fit inside a library cubicle. Nobody tells us about the particular kind of silence that follows you into postgraduate. The silence of sitting in a room full of people and feeling, with complete conviction that you do not belong there. The silence of smiling through a conversation while a voice inside you whispers to you that you might have bitten more than you can chew; or that you are punching above your weight.
I have felt that silence more times than I can count these past years. Some nights it follows me home.
There is something disorienting, almost lonely about being the youngest person in a room. Not just young in age, but in everything; experience, confidence, the number of times you have been asked for your opinion and had people actually wait for it. I have sat in seminars and workshops where the people around me have spent more years studying economics than I have been alive (lol funny I know). They speak with a kind of ease that I am still learning to perform. They reference papers, frameworks, conferences I have not yet read, attended, or in some cases even heard of. I sit there taking notes, nodding at the right moments, my heart beating slightly too fast, quietly wondering if the invitation that brought me into the room was sent to the wrong person.
That is imposter syndrome in its most honest form. Not the polished version people describe in LinkedIn posts where they overcame it and came out stronger. The raw version. The one that visits you at two in the morning. The one where you reread your own work and cannot decide if it is genuinely good or if everyone around you has simply been too polite to say otherwise. The one where a single piece of critical feedback can undo weeks of quiet confidence in a single sentence. The one where you achieve something and your first instinct is not pride but suspicion, a small dread, wondering when someone will finally notice that you do not quite belong among the people who usually achieve things like this.
Postgraduate studies in South Africa carry their own particular weight, and they press harder on some shoulders than others. The rooms I have walked into were not built with me in mind. That is not a complaint; it is just an honest reading of the architecture, physical and institutional alike. When you are young, Black, and still finding your voice in a discipline that has historically not made much space for voices like yours, the silence I described earlier takes on a different texture. It is not just self-doubt. It is self-doubt with a history behind it, a weight that was handed to you long before you ever walked through the door. And no amount of academic achievement fully quiets that history, at least not yet.
What nobody prepares you for is the loneliness that does not look like loneliness from the outside. I am surrounded by peers, supervisors, colleagues. I am busy. My calendar is full. And yet there are days when the weight of it: the research, the uncertainty, the endless performance of competence, the quiet fear of being found out, sits entirely on your own shoulders, and there is no one you can quite hand it to. Postgraduate studies are at their core a solitary exercise. You are ultimately responsible for a body of work that only you fully understand, being evaluated by people who know far more than you, in a system that was not designed to make you feel at home. There are evenings when that realisation sits in your chest like a stone.
And yet.
I am still here.
I do not say that triumphantly. I say it quietly, the way you say something that only becomes true once you say it out loud. On the days when the imposter syndrome is loudest, when the gap between where I am and where I think I should be feels unbearably wide, I try to remember that staying is its own form of courage. That being the youngest in the room means someone, somewhere, decided the room needed you in it. That being the least experienced does not mean being the least worthy. These are things I know intellectually and am still learning to believe in my bones. That gap, between knowing and believing, is where most of postgraduate life actually happens. It is where I spend most of my days.
If you are reading this from inside a similar silence, I want you to know that I see you. Not the version of you that performs confidence in seminars. The version that wakes every morning, sits on the bed for a moment longer than necessary, and wonders if you are cut out for this at all. That version is not a failure. That version is just honest, and honest is not the same as weak. And honesty, I have found, is the beginning of actually belonging somewhere; not the pretending kind of belonging, but the kind that is earned slowly, through the work and the doubt and the decision, made quietly every single day, to keep going.
The silence never fully leaves. I am learning that it is also, in ways I am only beginning to understand, the sound of a walk that is fully my own.