I Hate How Long It Took Me to Be Confident in Myself
A story of how faking it until I made it was a mistake.
A story of how faking it until I made it was a mistake.
Confidence is a very useful tool. It allows you to leap when others cower. It even tends to make you more attractive to others. There are very few things in this world that are not improved when you have confidence. I hate how long I waited to start believing in myself. But first, a little backstory.
People have always seen me as a confident person. But I never saw myself that way, I was very good at pretending. If you met me on the street, you’d likely say that I was outgoing. At parties, I tended to be the guy who would start conversations with anyone. Some might even say I was charming.
But presenting this persona was a huge mental toll. To be that person, I had to ramp myself up for the night ahead. I would often cancel plans because I could not get myself into a mental state of being that confident, outgoing person. It was a mask I wasn’t willing to leave home without.
When I would make it out, alcohol tended to be the enhancer of choice. Athletes may have HGH, but for anxious people who feel compelled to act confident, alcohol does the trick.
At work, it meant portraying a person who understood more than I actually believed I did. What I realized later in life was that I did actually know more than I gave myself credit for, but the self-doubt gave me a huge case of imposter syndrome.
Over the years, I had built the persona of a confident person without actually feeling confident in myself. This ate away at my understanding of who I was. I felt the need to perform and be the person that people expected.
On a recent podcast hosted by Conan O’Brien, a comment he made while interviewing Dax Sheppard connected with me. He talked about needing to live up to the persona his audience expected him to be. But, if he was upstairs and someone rang the bell, he would hope his wife answered the door. This way, he could avoid having to get ready for an interaction with a stranger.
Although I am not a famous person, I acted the exact same way. When my landlord would show up to do yard work, I would do my best to sneak into the door without being seen. I had no good reason to avoid speaking to my landlord, but if I wasn’t mentally in a place to “perform” I would do whatever I could to avoid the interaction.
The worst part for me was that I faked being confident for so long that I lost touch with what was actually important to me. The only thing that mattered was keeping up the charade.
This led me to keep the company of other seemingly confident people, even if I didn’t like them. There was a strength in numbers that made acting confident easier.
If I was in the company of confident people, onlookers believed I was as confident as my group based on nothing more than proximity.
But acting confident and being confident are very different things. The biggest problem with faking it comes from how a confident person makes decisions versus someone who is just pretending.
As an imposter, I missed the nuance in actions being taken by the confident. It was hard to understand why the things they did would resonate more with people. Even though, at the time, I felt I was saying and doing the exact same things. As I became more confident, I realized the way I compensated for my lack of confidence was perceptible to people. Even if they didn’t realize why they put less stock in what I was saying. It was subtle things. When I was pretending to be confident, I would be analyze what I was saying as it was leaving my mouth. This would come out as downplaying my own words with a self-deprecating tone that conveyed disbelief in what I was saying.
The worst part about pretending to be confident was the people that I hurt. Because I was not true to myself, I made promises that I never kept. I told people things that supported the persona, but when reality caught up to what was said, I couldn’t live up to it. My fake confidence gave me many shallow relationships. It also gave me an unhealthy obsessiveness with maintaining relationships with anyone who seemed to care about me. Constantly having to live up to what was expected, instead of being present in the relationship had me living a life outside myself.
The best way to explain it is to anyone who plays third-person video games. That is how I felt about my life. A controller outside of the actual person taking part in the game. I would watch the decisions being made, the things being said, and the consequences of those actions. But, unlike your first-person life, I was detached from the consequences. They felt like they were episodic. Like at the end of a sitcom where everything gets resolved and then no one talks about what happened in the next episode. Because I didn’t feel like the confident person making these choices, I didn’t feel like I deserved any of the consequences of the actions, good or bad.
Now, I am a more confident person. Still not to level that I used to pretend to be, but I am confident enough to understand who I am. I know more about myself and the things I believe in. I can share my opinions and thoughts on topics I care about with an internal knowledge that it’s okay if people don’t agree with me. That doesn’t have to affect who I am as a person.
If I could go back in time, I would have stopped trying to fake it. I would have spent the time finding my real voice and expressing my real self to others. The good news, there’s a good chance I have a lot of life left to live so I can soldier on, no longer pretending to be a confident person.
If you still haven’t found your voice, stop worrying about projecting your made up version of a confident person. You will learn more about who you are by wearing your anxieties and learning how to deal with them. Because it is through understanding your quirks, not erasing them, that you will become a confident person.
And everyone deserves to be confident in who they are, no matter what.