What Do We Want? Self-Confidence!
When do we want it? Sometime before we die would be nice
Though I don’t plan to die in a memorable way, and I’m not famous, I still wrote a memoir.
This memoir:
MISBEHAVING IN MAINE
Ever wonder what happened to that kid in your elementary school who made bombs, shot cars with BB guns…
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Now I want to write Part II and call it “Misbehaving In Maine Part II: This Time, It’s Personal.”
Image lightly borrowed from the global data highway
To be clear, I just like the tagline — Part I was personal. All of it. It was all about the domestic war between me and my older brother, Joe.
It focused on growing up through the gravity of a powerful brother and what that does to the structure of a person’s identity.
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Part II will keep exploring identity. Specifically, I want to understand why I have such a hard time with self-confidence.
Think of the self as a chair and confidence as a person looking for a place to sit. Sadly, my chair is known for falling to pieces without warning, making Confidence extremely jumpy when it comes to sitting. It’s found itself lying on its back atop a pile of pointy chair debris so many times. Confidence’s back and butt look like the flesh of smallpox survivors if smallpox was Big-Ass Pox.
What makes the Dan self crumble?
People.
Let’s prune these people down to two types:
Person Awesome
This comrade’s aura produces a powerful updraft, and I’m a happy dot in the sky, a seagull with a bellyful of your beach lunch.
Person Zero
Here, we have a gutter, the knife kind. Zero’s awful art carves a capital L for “Loser” in my torso:
He stabs six inches up from my nuts,
cuts over, cuts upward.
See my runaway guts?
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But we’re on a road trip, me and Zero, a trip that’s just beginning, or we’re dining at a restaurant; we haven’t ordered yet. In other words, it’s going to be a while before I can get away. I have to do my best through the rest of the encounter to act like a person full of guts and doing great.
Stick around, it gets worse:
Lately, I’ve noticed that Person Awesome can transform into Mr. Zero in a single sitting. I’m a seagull again, so high I should be well out of knife range. Not so. In a flash, you get your hot lunch back. It falls from the sky toward your happy mouth like God’s regurgitations for naughty prophets.
I just can’t trust this self of mine. Not around people.
They’re comforting angels; they’re soul-sucking devils who make me feel doom at 20th-century levels.
All aboard the Eliot Special…
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
Yes, afraid.
Friends and neighbors, I don’t walk a straight line through life. I don’t mean the line goes this way and that as a result of my following curiosity’s lead and chasing delight. Sometimes, I live that way, that well: I line walk, I crow fly, I live in line with who I truly am, which is the shortest distance between here, where I’m happy, and where I want to be: happy still.
When I’m walking the line, every present moment, every now, is the highest goal of the previous now.
That’s me at my best.
At my worst, fear tells me where to go, and I obey.
How did I find this out? I’ll tell you using an explanation that isn’t a stretch or a strain at all:
Here’s one way scientists find faraway planets, those too far away to be seen by any means: They watch for sun wiggling. It’s called the “Doppler wobble technique.” When a sun shimmies, astronomers know something’s causing that shimmy, something big. The revolving planet or planets create a “gravitational tug.” That’s the wobble.
And I bet this makes stargazing Walt Whitman happy.
“I sing myself…”
I bet you do. Unfortunately, the best I can do most of the time is science myself:
I studied my wiggles, the many moments when the straight line veered right or left, up or down. I sang, “These seem to be paths of avoidance or escape. And notice: Every time it happens, there’s a person in the path. Using the Danny Wavy Technique, I have discovered he’s afraid of people.”
I will use my second memoir to help me understand why people have the power to make me doubt myself and fall apart, or, as some would say, why I give people that power.
Once I know, I’m certain I’ll have a more reliable self. Dear Confidence, come back.
Behold: a beautiful chair of stone,
cozy in its indestructibility.
Confidence, sit and stay. Make yourself at home
and never leave,
then I can be (and never stop being) me.
Here’s what I’m hoping:
Each story in the new book will be a tree or “frond” in a kelp forest.
It has to be a kelp forest, because a forest forest isn’t dark enough down at the roots.
Darkness here represents the distant past.
Mystery.
The stories (kelp fronds, remember) will lead to something down in the deeps.
What something? The one responsible for this fair-weather self.
The fronds will do more than lead; they’ll cling to this “something” with their roots, a system called the “holdfast.”
I’ll climb down the stories, hand over hand, all the way to The Something and find out what it is by feel.
Story by story, I’ll know The Something better.
I’ll learn it like blind men learn elephants.
I’ll touch every effing inch of the deep sea elephant I’m after.
Once I know the location, size, and shape of this beast, I’ll dissect him and label his many pieces.
No one will know the elephant better than me, and when you know a thing down to its smallest parts, which means you know its nature, its ways, it can’t surprise you anymore.
The self, armed with elephant knowledge, will sense approaching collapses and make them known like the thunder prophesies of old-timers’ knees, and the self will tighten up.
Endure.
Collapses will try.
Collapses will fail.
This means elephant failure. He will collapse.
And the kelp forest, having completed its mission, will release the holdfasts.
Watch the fronds rise out of the dark, appearing on the surface, a vast tapestry of green, new continent, the wreckage of an utterly exploded metaphor.
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As you can see, getting to the bottom of self-confidence problems takes a lot of work and time.
Thankfully, you don’t have to totally understand why you’re the way you are to change something about yourself right now.
Thank God and therapy for the almighty power of behavior.
Lincoln, Wilde, and Dr. Phil said,
“Behave your way to success.”
What they mean is, if you’re stuck, you don’t have to stay there, waiting to understand why you’re stuck.
Don’t wait for understanding.
Stand up right now and walk in a desired direction. Away from the sticking place.
Stretch those legs and head for a better now.
Understanding will come in time. It’ll be an increasing wind at your back, daily protein, and a tilting of the road beneath your feet, a comfortable downhill.
But what does it mean to get up and walk?
In other words, how can I improve this self of mine right now, make it so my confidence increases?
The answer to this question came to me through something I hate:
collaboration
I’d rather work alone because it means more glory is mine. But it’s hard to knock collaboration after it answered a question in one sitting that I haven’t been able to answer after decades of thinking.
Who did I collaborate with?
Students.
English 242: Editing students.
When did this happen?
On the very last day of the semester.
I’m a teacher, which means I feel pressure on the last day to send the students off with something extra, a nugget of wisdom or joy that’ll say what’s in my heart:
“It’s been an honor learning with you.”
I tried creating this moment in another class, English 301: Genre Fiction, and failed.
I somehow got talking about death in 301. I mean, it was the last day, and we did end the semester on the horror unit, but still, you don’t want to sum up weeks and weeks of class time together by saying, “You’re all going to die. Have a nice summer.”
What’s nice about teaching more than one class is that you can ruin one of them and still salvage yourself with another.
I went into the last day of ENG 242 with one goal: Don’t talk too much about death. A little is inevitable at the age of 44, but keep it under control.
I talked about life, an area of life I’ve been thinking a lot about recently:
“Okay, we’ve done the editing things we came to do, but before you go, let’s get off topic and solve a life problem. We’ll make our minds work together as one. We’ll be the original ‘AI,’ the kind made of meat, back when it was just ‘I.’”
“Proceed,” they said.
I asked my question:
“What is the secret to self-confidence? If you don’t have it, how do you get it? If you have it, how do you keep it? Let’s figure it out.”
Now that I think about it, solving self-confidence problems isn’t off topic. It is an editing issue. We’re digging into a text, the self, and looking for ways to improve it.
On topic or off, the students had answers:
Alister said, “Stop caring what other people think.”
I laughed. Alister was pissed. “Oh,” I said. “You were serious.”
“Yes. Just stop caring.”
“Impossible. Next.”
“Don’t base your self-worth on performance,” said Bethany.
“I like the sound of this, and it might work, just not on Earth. Definitely not in America. Zero chance at this school. Never ever within families, especially my family. Anyone else?”
Calvin raised his hand. “Don’t compare yourself to other people.”
“Comparison kills, right?”
“Right.”
“Plus,” said Debbie, “every person is so different that comparison doesn’t make sense. Apples and oranges.”
“Truth,” I said. “And I wish my brain cared. But it does stuff that doesn’t make sense all the time. For example, it tries to make me look cool in front of people who don’t care if I live or die. More importantly, how do I stop comparing myself to other people when comparison feels as deep and inescapable as flinching when something flies at your eyes? It’s so automatic that everyone on Earth intimately understands the concepts of jealousy and envy.
There’s no culture anywhere ever that says or said, “Jealousy and envy… what are those?”
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Evelyn spoke without raising her hand. Evelyn’s like that. “When I get jealous, I decide not to be jealous.”
“Good for you and thanks for nothing.”
“No,” said Evelyn, “I mean, I do something with my jealousy. I respond to it by forcing myself to be curious.”
“Explain.”
“Like, I investigate. I don’t hide from the person I’m jealous of. If they’re better than me at something, I try to find out how. I want to learn from them. I get close enough to see them as a person instead of an object that brings me pain. It helps to see people as people.”
This reminded me of a great quote I pretended was mine: “It’s like I always say, ‘If you’re the smartest person in the room, then you are in the wrong room.’”
“I think Confucius said that.”
“You know what I think? Shut up, Alister.”
“How dare you!”
“Stop caring what people think, Alister. But you’re right: Confucius.” I delivered the quote again then explained:
“Confucius and Evelyn think you should spend time with people who are bigger, badder, and better than you are. That’s how you grow. If you surround yourself with people who make you feel powerful because they’re somehow weaker, you’ll never grow. In fact, you’ll shrink, and you’ll force the people around you to shrink, ensuring the survival of your ego.”
“So,” Frank said, “the way to self-confidence is pain?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s painful to be around the people who make you envious and jealous. It’s scary.”
Scary.
And there it was again.
Fear.
And that’s when something clicked in this old brain, something my last therapist was trying to tell me…
According to cognitive behavioral therapy, fear has a shelf life. My therapist said it’s about 20 minutes. When you do something scary (as long as it isn’t lethal), your fear factories can only produce feelings of fear for 20 minutes before they’re out of product.
The brain says, “I guess he’s not dying. Power down the factory.”
This doesn’t mean the fear goes away completely. It sure can simmer. But there is a drop in fear, and it’s significant enough for you to learn something about the thing you were afraid of:
“Wow… it’s not as scary as I thought it was.”
But if you behave like I do and run away before the fear has a chance to shrink, you’re teaching your brain that the thing you thought was scary is scary indeed. 100% And the next time you bump into this thing, your fear will be a little stronger.
A long time ago, at the beginning of this talk of ours, yours and mine, I said I have a self that crumbles. Fear cuts me deeply, widely. The guts tumble. And when I can’t escape the fear, the blade, the scary person, “I have to do my best through the rest of the encounter to act like a person full of guts and doing great.”
Maybe you call this “Fake it till you make it.”
But the fake self I produce in these situations is so far from who I really am, no spark of life can leap from the fake thing to the crumbled thing to make it live again. It’s like I’m jumpstarting Truck One (dumping that clutch) to start the engine of Truck Two.
I’m too scared to fake it daringly enough to make it.
Therefore, we have the two strategies of Dan:
The tortoise and the hare.
I reel in all my vulnerable bits so deeply you can’t tell that this Dan is anything but a shell. A dead thing. I can’t tell either. I feel dead.
Or I run like mad.
Both reactions teach the brain that my fears of people are to be taken very seriously because actions speak so much louder than thoughts.
I think, therefore I am, though only in theory. I do, therefore I am, in fact.
I said/yelled all this at the students. Epiphanies make me happy, and when I’m happy, I’m loud. 44-year-old yeller.
“WE DID IT! WE SOLVED THE PROBLEM! The way to self-confidence is as the crow flies, just like the straight-line way to delight. You don’t go around things that make you uncomfortable; you go through them. Through them! Holy balls! Holy CRAP! You know how hate is the opposite of love, life is the opposite of death, and kelpless elephants are the opposite of self-knowledge?”
“What?”
“Well, the opposite of confidence is fear! If you want to grow your confidence, you have to shrink your fear!”
They thought about this. They seemed to agree.
Then Alister untangled his stink face to say, “So that means you have to be with people more. Like, a lot more. You can’t run away now. And when you turtle, you have to force your vulnerable bits out into the open. Take risks. That’s what ‘Fake it till you make it’ really means. It doesn’t mean safety.”
Bethany, Debbie, Calvin, Confucius, Evelyn, and Frank agreed.
“You’re right,” I said. Shit. “More people for me, it seems. No running away.” Shit. “No fake faking it. I’ll have to stay and try and wait for the fear to drop.” Shit. “And since it’s an old, old fear, I bet it’ll take my brain a long time” shit-long “to really get the new message. To change. I’ll have to do this so many times… with so many people… and it might take…”
Years.
“Years!” Alister said.
Shut up.
But the only thing worse than years of hunting and shrinking fear is getting shoved around by fear all your life.
And so, friends and neighbors, yay for epiphanies.
Yay for a way out of this ancient prison of mine.
And, with a sigh…
shit.
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