The Journey to Self-knowledge and Confidence
I’ve never been the social type, hell, when I was young I didn’t feel confident enough to speak to my cousins (and we’re a really close family). I thought that me being younger than them meant there was nothing I could bring to the conversation.
And yet my sister, who is younger than me, was able to hold conversations with them and even make them laugh. How could she do such a thing? It was beyond me.
When we were at parties, she would start talking to other groups of people, and then she would introduce me to them, there were some people that I connected with, but most of the times I struggled to hold conversations.
What was my excuse this time? Maybe we just had different interests, or we weren’t “compatible” (whatever that means…). Eventually, I realized that in every failed conversation I had there was only one thing in common, me.
Why couldn’t I hold conversations with most people? All I knew was that every time I had to speak with someone I didn’t know, my mind would start racing with thoughts of worry. “What if I’m boring them?”, “What can I say next?”, “There’s nothing I can say that they haven’t heard before.”
After a while the answer became obvious, my problem wasn’t that I didn’t feel comfortable with other people, my problem was that I didn’t feel comfortable with myself.
I always knew I had confidence issues, what I didn’t know was how much that was affecting every aspect of my life.
They manifested in my relationships through jelousy, feeling threatened when someone was better than me at anything, or self-sabotaging the relationship when things were going great because deep down I felt I didn’t deserve it or that I would do a favor to the other person by pushing them away.
I never felt that I could bring something to the table, so I never did. I felt that I was boring people, so I did. I thought very little of me, so I was little.
Once I realized the power my thoughts had over me, how they were shaping who I was and what I did or didn’t do, I started listening and paying attention to them, every time a negative thought would appear, I would replace it a positive one.
Overcoming my confidence issues wasn’t easy, I had to dig deep into myself and work my way out, getting rid of the negative thoughts and replacing them with positive ones, often facing hard truths about oneself. I worked hard to change what I didn’t like about myself, and what couldn’t be changed I accepted and embraced over time.
It’s been some years now since I started getting to know myself and improving constantly, I’ve done things that I thought I could never do when I started, I’m having interesting conversations with strangers or people I’m getting to know, I asked a girl out (which believe it or not is a quite an accomplishment for me), I’m learning how to dance which was something that I always avoided because I feared failure.
The journey has been long, and there’s still a lot to go through, but it’s a path that has to be walked. I knew there was no other option for me, I couldn’t live my life in the passenger seat, not anymore.
