The fragility of confidence
I was a very meek child. Hid behind my dad’s legs, had my mum wave to me from our flat when I went to the shop that was literally on the first floor of our apartment, made myself scarce by finding an empty room to hide during gatherings. Age, practical reasons, societal expectations, and the myriad of things that makes you face life head on and forces you to come out of your shell as you grow up undid a considerable portion of this. But there are still so many things I stopped myself from doing on a daily basis because I was “shy” or thought asking for it presented as a weakness people can point and laugh at or just couldn’t muster the confidence for.
I thought I had peaked in life. Then the lockdowns happened. At the time I was turning 30. Which made me unpack and unlearn a lot of things about myself I otherwise wouldn’t have simply because I didn’t have the opportunity, time, and space to sit in silence with my own thoughts. This internal regroup made me feel so much surer of myself than I ever had before. And I felt this newfound feeling of security was reflected to me when I went to the post office after the first lockdown eased up. I had to fill up the customs/ postal information and the little station they have with all those forms had two people and no spare pens. I waited around for a couple of minutes but neither seemed to be parting ways with the pens. You know what I did? I walked over to an empty counter and asked the lady behind it if I could please borrow a pen as there was none at the station. It wasn’t until the lady smiled and handed a pen to me with an “Of course!” that I realised I had done this intuitively without missing a beat. You know what I would have done pre-pandemic? Quietly stood in a corner, landing on a facial expression that’s between “It’s all cool. It’s chill.” and “Can someone PLEASE finish writing?? I really need a pen!!” as impatience morphed into quiet seething. “Why didn’t I just bring a pen? Well, why don’t you ask someone? No, what if they ask why didn’t you bring a pen??” would be the anthem of my internal war. The post office lady and her smile had me feeling mighty pleased with myself; I saw it as a reaffirmation of the whole “You get what you ask for in life!” thing. And I was so proud of myself for getting over myself that I later treated myself to chocolate. I was getting confident in my thirties! Yay me!
Fast forward a few months, I went to meet my friend at a Vietnamese restaurant. Backstory about me: I’m good with square and thick chopsticks. I’m not very good with thin and flat chopsticks, I still need practice. The latter is what the restaurant had at the self-service cutlery station so, I picked up a fork and a spoon instead to dig into my pho. Midway during the meal, four teenagers sat next to my friend and me and at one point, one of them looked over at me and loudly said, “Oh my god why can’t she just use the chopsticks? Like, what’s her problem?” and cackled as the other three joined her. My fork slipped out of my hand and landed in my soup with a soft plop. I was… mortified. I wanted to leave right away. My confidence had dissolved into the pho with no semblance of its once defiant existence like the soy sauce I had added. I’m not going to lie, I even blinked back a tear – I didn’t cry, my brain just triggers tears when I’m emotionally overwhelmed. I still enter a shame spiral when I think about this incident. I alternate between blaming myself, “Of course everyone is using chopsticks, Thendral. I can’t use thin chopsticks sounds like such a WEAK excuse.” and raging, “I mean these kids are half my age, why am I holding their opinion to heart?? Who cares what they think?? The restaurant had forks, I picked up a fork, what’s the problem??”
So, why bring it up now? You see, I still think about how I was laughed at in a restaurant. By a bunch of kids. And I (still) let it get to me. I just didn’t get it. Something about this incident wasn’t adding up and I wondered if I’m just not a confident person after all and I had a few months of false bravado in me. That fake it til you make it is not a thing. Until, something happened during my trip to India this past December. I snapped at a guy. In a temple. I’m not going to get into the specifics, but please believe me when I say it was justified – it’s not that hard to guess what could have happened. The silence that followed (because we were all in a line) was DEAFENING. I didn’t yell. But I was loud enough. So where did this come from? Was I pushed to my limits? Have I entered my “I don’t give a fuck” era that’s associated with age? Or was I confident enough to put this man in his place?
I don’t have an answer. I can never really tell with these things – confidence, self-esteem, ego. I mean yeah, I know one is about how we value ourselves, another is about believing in ourselves, especially our skillset, one can exist without the other, yada yada, the full works. I was a Psych major. But I don’t think the answer to the way my brain has connected these three incidents has anything to do with confidence like I thought it did.
See, confidence is a tricky thing. Especially for women, I feel confidence is another thing they’re trying to sell us in this modern woman package – where if we were just a bit more confident in the way we carry ourselves, assert ourselves in meetings and owned ourselves we could have it all. Now, obviously confidence is not restricted to gender, but it’s just the way it’s presented as our confidence or the lack thereof is the problem. Not the world. We are taught to be confident while the world is not taught (or refuses to learn) to accept our confidence. Just look at the way it’s still so easy to be called a bitch when all you did was assert yourself. The character assassination that happens when a Tamil actress divorces her husband or speaks her mind. Words like confident, bold, and strong aren’t used. It’s words like “arrogant” and the all too familiar South Asian “head weight” that get thrown around with a bunch of vulgarities. People stand on stages, in the athletic setting, the stand-up comedy setting, the audio launch setting and say, “More women need to come out of their shells.” No one is saying “Give the women in your homes the support she needs to feel like she can do something.” It’s always easier to blame it on us, then it is to teach the rest of the world to take responsibility. To show accountability. Meanwhile, we have been raised to turn inward for things like these. Pretty much everything for that matter. What could we have done to rectify our situation?
And now here’s the biggest bait and switch of all. Turns out, confidence is not a permanent state you can achieve and maintain. It ebbs and flows, waxes and wanes, shines and dulls (interestingly enough, in tandem with my menstrual cycle). Just like any other quality. It’s not confidence that spurred me to ask for a pen or yell at a guy. It’s that it was the right thing to do. And it’s not my lack of feeling secure in myself that still makes me still about the time some children laughed at me. It’s that wanting to leave (and actually leaving within 5 minutes) because a bunch of kids laughed at me was not the right thing to do. The right thing to do would be to ignore a bunch of minors. So, here’s to me giving up on trying to inculcate confidence in myself and teaching myself to speak up for myself more and stuff like that in 2023 and beyond. I’m shifting my focus to “What’s the right thing to do here?” And if I didn’t do the right thing, then what can I do or say the next time that could be the right thing? Because if I am confident and spoke up for myself, and didn’t get what I wanted, or worse yet, was gaslit and emotionally abused, what is my plan of action for the next time? To try to be more confident? It just makes more sense to look at it as I spoke up for myself, it was the right thing to do, but guess what, sometimes people don’t react how we expect them to. Honestly, it’s so much easier for me to make peace with myself this way. I also feel it explains my actions to me for my late-night introspections so much better than looking at all these values that for some reason now feel…hollow and fragile.
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