Week 29: Confidence (Reprise)

“All I ever wanted was to know what to do.” – Dave Eggers

I swear to every god I know that I did not plan this – I’ve actually been writing (and re-writing) this blog for about 2 months now. However, almost exactly a year ago (Sept 8th, 2020), I posted this blog titled Confidence. In essence, I wrote about how I did not know what it meant to be confident; how I am not confident; how I know how to identify confidence in others but I do not know how to become confident myself; and how I was frustrated that confidence had to come with “time”. Fortunately for me, the past two months have been incredibly turbulent – but I’ve emerged with exactly what I’ve sought after for my entire life: confidence.

I remember seeing the Dave Eggers quote above as I scrolled through facebook one night in bed about six months ago, I was eating pretzels. Holy shit, I thought. I, by myself, have never known what to do. I am historically an anxious person. For most of my life, I’ve always been so uncertain of my own decisions; I’ve spent a lot of time worrying that they’ve all been the wrong ones. Also, I’ve always been unassured by my capacity to handle adversity, especially any adversity that comes as a result of my own wrong decisions – for good reason, as for a lot of my life, I’ve coped with adversity through harmful means, like starving myself. I’ve always sought out certainty and assurance through others – or alternatively, obsessing over decisions I’ve made (for instance, finding comfort in the excel sheets I’ve made to track virtually every aspect of my life and analyzing things to bits).

In my first blog about confidence, I hypothesized that my lack of confidence would resolve with time. I remember writing that I hated this fact because it meant that there wasn’t anything I could possibly do in the moment to develop genuine confidence – and I am not patient. I do not like when people treat “time” as some omnipotent entity which contains all of the solutions to any problem I may have, because it’s not – It’s just a tool. Moreover, I do not understand why people speak of “time” with such high regard and faith. The only mandate time has is to make you old; anything else that happens requires auxiliary effort. With regards to developing confidence, time is not the main contributor. I have since learned that adversity is the main contributor. Recent adversity revealed my truest constitution and capabilities, and gave me reason to be confident in myself. Time allows for adversity to happen and exposes one to more adverse situations – but time on its own without adversity would not have given me confidence.

In mid-July, I found myself in a messy situation wherein I was left to make a difficult choice. Quite the adversity-riddled situation. During the downfall of it all, I felt quite horrible – but it was mostly out of anticipation of how I’d handle myself rather than anything to do with the situation itself. This situation was the first of its kind that I had to face since beginning recovery for my eating disorder and working on myself. I was quite worried about the idea of relapsing and finding my way back to harmful behaviours.

However, something had changed. Somehow, in the background of all the mess and chaos of every day life – I had changed. After a year and a half of taking care of myself and building routines & contingencies, I secretly became a fucking superhero. Who knew? The night I got home from this messy situation, it’s as if my body went into autopilot – it knew exactly what to do. I unpacked my suitcase, I cleaned my room, I did laundry, I cooked supper and ate the whole damn thing, I went for a run, I did everything I had planned to do as if it had been a normal night. Mentally I felt quite horrible, and that’s okay – but it didn’t matter or inhibit me. The next night, it was the same. Night after night, I kept doing exactly what I had planned to do – and it became easier every time. It was only a matter of days before life was back to normal; Except – it kinda wasn’t. It was better.

Okay, so then I felt sorta invincible. This initial situation described above was all to do with my personal life and it was the result of a risk I took – and despite it not working out, I had gained something (to my surprise). For the first time in my life, I found comfort and self-assurance in things not working out the way I so badly wanted them to. If all of this hadn’t happened in this exact way, then the rest of these two months leading up to now wouldn’t have happened the way they did; and before I knew it, this momentum had shifted into my professional life.

Being a graduate of physics, I have studied “momentum” quite a lot. I mostly associate it with moving objects in the most literal sense. Hardly do I ever think of it as a psychological entity, one to do with the results of our choices – but I have realized that the confidence that arises from our choices has inherent momentum. It moves with you, and builds upon itself. I discovered confidence in the aforementioned messy situation, but then I began to consciously use it. While I’d love nothing more than to describe to you some more objective ways in which my career has benefitted from this confidence – I am not at liberty to do so. Perhaps one day I will be. Just know that I the past two months have been an absolute whirlwind and have been full of the most difficult decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life. Within this, I have discovered my power; I have advocated for myself in ways that I never have previously; and I have defended myself against people whom I thought I never could. I have found a voice within me that I have refused to acknowledge or trust for an entire lifetime before now. I have become a force to be reckoned with. I am brave; and with any moment of doubt or overwhelming stress – I reiterate to myself the proven fact that I know exactly what to do.

Something I can discuss though is my newfound separation from my reliance on others to know what to do. There have been many times in the electrical workshop at the end of the day where I’ve attested that “my only goal in life is to be supervisor’s name” or “coworker’s name“. I have done this all my life – my goals have been based on the accomplishments of people I know. This can be helpful when forming a baseline – but adhering to this strategy has hardly ever fulfilled my own interests and desires. Furthermore, this inevitably ends with some unnecessary disappointment. Perhaps I can be similar to supervisor’s name, but it is unlikely to happen exactly the same way it did for him – and when I become aware of any discrepancies in the process, I become anxious about not doing it exactly right (exactly like he did). However, adhering to supervisor’s process and timelines was a way that I could absolve myself from having to know what to do – clearly, my supervisor and anybody else who I view this way must know what to do because they’re doing whatever it is I aspire to do. Me, having had no confidence, would not have faith that I knew what to do if it weren’t for these people. Over the past two months, I’ve not compared myself to these people and I’ve been focusing on my development as it’s own stand-alone entity. Because, of course, now I believe that I know what to do. Knowing what to do comes from within. You cannot know what to do by mimicking somebody else – you may be doing things, but you certainly won’t know anything.

One year ago, I was worried about not knowing how to become the person I am today. Today, I wonder, why the hell was I ever worried about it at all. I can learn to be anything I want, given the time. Even confident. For so long, I’ve thought confidence was the same as being assured that you were unlikely to make a wrong decision. This is actually just arrogance. Confidence is being assured that when you do inevitably make a wrong decision – or if life makes one for you – you will still know what to do. Confidence is being comfortable with flexibility. Confidence is taking risks knowing that you will prevail irregardless of the outcome. Confidence is being willfully adaptive, a coherence of oneself with “change”. Confidence is choosing to evolve knowing that the foundation that genuine growth is built upon is found within yourself – and nobody else can provide that foundation for you. Two months ago I did not know any of these things to be true, and certainly not about myself – but now I am certain that they are. I am certain of myself. I am confident, because I know exactly what to do. No matter the situation. All of the time. Forever.

(September 7th, 2021)