Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Confidence: You Are Who You Pretend to Be
Who appears to be the most confident person you know might be a better way to ask this question.
A person who can make a speech before a thousand people might struggle striking up a conversation at the bar. A person who can run ten miles a day might be afraid to enter a fun run for the local hospital. The writer of a dozen winning funding proposals might shrink at writing a haiku to read to friends.
I don’t know any truly confident people. Maybe I don’t want to. I like uneven people a lot better. Inconsistency is embraceable in my world. You’re scared of snakes but not of giant iguanas? You can hold a flashlight and trek into the woods to find a homeless person but get weak in the knees talking to a reporter? You’re my type.
Confidence is hidden. Tucked into nooks and crannies of a person’s character and soul – immeasurable, fugitive, and undependable. It’s best that way. If a person was thoroughly confident – all day every day in every way, they’d trip on their own hubris. Scaredy cats who muster up the courage to do very hard things are my heroes.
Years ago when I was personally in a very crumbly condition, when I walked to my therapist’s house six blocks from mine across from the high school and she would sit me down in her office with the windows looking out at her birdfeeders and I’d tell her about the latest bit of shrinkage to my life and ambition and how I wanted to be brave and successful in life, she said, “You are who you pretend to be.”
If I was one to get a tattoo, that’s what it would say. That one sentence has gotten me pretty far.
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
I suspect we are ALL a mixed bag of confidence and diffidence. When I was working, I could do pretty much anything with software. I can’t do it anymore. Some stuff, if you don’t do it you forget. I often think a lot of what I knew was more a willingness to try until something worked. I’m not sure I knew more, but I was braver about giving it a try.
I like that one. I’m writing it down and it may just show up on my wall in some form 🙂
that is a mighty powerful quote and I believe it to be true. we all have our moments, some of easy bravery, but the bravest ones of all are when we do something scary even when we don’t have full confidence about what will happen, because it is the right thing to do or something we need to do