The Next Leg of the Confidence Hike

When I was 23, I was doing research for a press release in the nursing ed building of the small college where I worked. On the wall of one classroom was a poster listing the symptoms of chronic low self-esteem.

I displayed all of them.

I berated myself: Really? That’s stuff that high school girls deal with. You should be over that by now. You’re making yourself fit this description so that you can play victim and feel sorry for yourself. But it nagged at me.

Many times over my adult life, I’ve felt that I could have created more positive/desired outcomes for myself, if only I’d been more confident. 

“If only,” as if it’s a decision you can just snap your fingers and make.

It’s been more like a long hike, over a few tall peaks and through a lot of deep valleys. I think it really is an ongoing journey, and never a destination you fully arrive at.

I also imagine a foundation of the Self, poured like concrete, in one’s youth -- cracks and holes and all. You attempt to grow up, and as the foundation cures, you try to build a strong sense of self on it. You stand up on your foundation and get to work on the adult person you will become.

And then real life comes along. Occasionally it lifts you up, but often just knocks the shit out of you.

You lie there, debating whether “that’s just life,” and there’s not much to be done, or if it’s because of the cracks and holes in the foundation you were standing on. When you can, you fill in the cracks and holes as well as you are able, knowing that they will always exist and that you’ll likely have to go back and fill them in again. Eventually you try to stand back up.

For me, confidence primarily comes from four typical places: stability in my day job, validation/attention from specific groups people, progress in my artistic pursuits, and in my body/small physical achievements. Today I’m going to explore the first and second. I’ll save the others for later posts.

Back to the time period of nursing classroom: I dealt with imposter syndrome in my early 20s. I had a job and a home that I felt I had lucked into, that I hadn’t really done enough to earn. I constantly felt overwhelmed and in over my head, dreading the day when all would be revealed: I didn’t actually know what I was doing, and stuff had just been handed to me.

I eventually left and attempted to start over in Chicago, determined to live a life more in line with what I truly wanted. Unfortunately, my confidence in my dayjob-related abilities took a long, hard beating. I spent the better part of four years getting fired and laid off from multiple restaurant, temp and office jobs. It was like enduring multiple blows to the head, and you can’t really solve problems if you have a concussion.  

I was disoriented, hurt, and running in a mental hamster wheel trying to figure out what to do. How much of it was my fault, and how much was just the wrong time/wrong situation? Was something wrong with me? Did I have a learning disability, or ADHD? Was I lazy, and didn’t realize it? Did I need to go back to school? Would that even help, or just put me in debt and give me an excuse to avoid the real world? Was I genuinely just a bad employee, and only now realizing it because everyone had been cutting me breaks before? Was I completely delusional about my abilities?

If you’ve ever been caught in the job-hunting rut, you know that the longer you go without an interview or a response to your applications, the lower your confidence sinks and the more difficult it is to push yourself to apply for more jobs—because you begin to question what (if anything) you’re actually good for, if no one is taking notice of your resume. But job hunting is a numbers game. The fewer applications you finish, the less likely you are to ever get hired.

To call it a nightmare might be exaggerating. A lot of people in the world deal with a lot worse. Maybe it was just low self-esteem. When something follows you for a long time — whether it’s a demonic entity or just a stray dog — sometimes it helps to give it a name.

Dating is also a numbers game, with success depending largely on your self-confidence level.

In grade school, I had the same social frustrations and self-esteem problems that a lot of people have. People made fun of my clothes, and made fun of the house I lived in. Boys especially liked to throw things at me (Nerf balls, pebbles), tape tacks in my chair; standard stuff.

When I finally did start to think that maybe all boys weren’t terrible and gross — real boys, not the pop stars and movie characters that populated my imagination— the boys I liked didn’t like me back. (Again, normal.) The boys who liked me, I was either not attracted to, annoyed by, or had nothing in common with. The revelation that such-and-so wanted to go out with me typically came flying out of nowhere; a car about to hit a doe caught in the headlights. I had no idea what to do with such information.  I felt behind; like I had somehow skipped the semester when they taught us how to flirt, how to aim your appeal at the right person, and how to control who approached you.

Then there was the not-so-normal stuff.

I had a knack for attracting what inherently felt like “the wrong kind of attention” from older men. For many years, I wondered how it was that I somehow walked around with the words “Precocious” or “Jailbait” stamped on my forehead, and how I could erase them.

For some, being able to attract amorous attention from people many years older would be a source of confidence. And, as I stumbled through my early twenties, I tried to spin it that way for myself. My brain echoed what those men told me: You’re mature for your age. You’re an old soul.

It wasn’t until I started to feel comfortable in my own nerdy, artsy, semi-bohemian skin with fellow geeks, Disneyheads and Rennies that I realized the “old soul” line was probably a bunch of horseshit.

I was a card-carrying Millennial. I craved “Good job, ‘A’ for effort!” praise and validation. I had no desire to settle down and marry and have children; I wanted to run away to the city and try to be a performer; go to Halloween parties, Renaissance fairs and costume contests, and spend my tax return on vacations to Disney World. Work superiors flirted with me, even while chuckling at my poor attempts to operate a fax machine or an 8 track player. I didn’t think about investing in the stock market or saving for retirement; what frightened me was whether my long-distance boyfriend would bother to text me that day. Having a deeper voice and liking 70s rock did not make me “mature for my age.”

While stewing in my Imposter Syndrome, I began to suspect these men, with their years of experience, were able to see straight through  me, right down to that need for validation and that need to feel special -- and they knew how to exploit it. Which meant that I was predictable, which meant that I wasn’t special. I was just “easy pickings,” somehow. I was prey. I could be counted on to crave the attention; to not have the chutzpah to say “In your dreams, you old creep. My dad is younger than you.”

Whether or not those men actually, consciously thought that way, I’ll never know. I awkwardly refused the gifts, the dates, the Friend requests on Facebook Messenger, and I went home to my cat and my DVD collection, where it felt safe. In my dreams, one of the men attacked me from behind, in a stairwell. I threw him over my shoulder, and down four flights. I watched placidly as his neck broke.

I woke up horrified, but also in awe of that woman, whose body I had subconsciously inhabited. I admired her strength, her conviction and her cool detachment from those whose attentions flustered and intimidated me.

I'm on a journey to become that woman, but the hike never ends.

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