For most of my life, I seemed -to others and to myself- like a very decisive, confident person. What I mean by this is that I could make decisions quickly and without subsequent regret, and that I forged forward even in daunting situations, such as speaking in public or being the first on the dancefloor.
Over the last couple of years, a weird thing started to happen: I didn’t always know what decision to make. It was a disconcerting feeling, this indecisiveness. Obviously, one of the bigger decisions of my life was on the table: whether to separate or not (not that it was that black & white in my mind), but even with more seemingly minor decisions, I just didn’t have the certainty I’d once had and I didn’t know why or what it meant.
In parallel, I started to notice that where there had only *seemed* to be confidence, there was a very old and familiar companion lurking: self-doubt. Self-doubt was the one who told me, when my previous blog was voted #4 “best blog” one year by the Montreal Mirror, that probably 7 people had voted for it*.
Although on the surface I gave little attention to these thoughts, for years, this is truly what I believed: that my successes were all flukes, exaggerations, or people just being nice. I moved to Montreal from Santiago, Chile and hoped that I could prove myself somewhere where no one with any power knew who I was, or what I had previously accomplished. I thought this would demonstrate that I merited whatever I achieved. I completely overlooked the fact that no one with any power knew who I was when I first moved to Chile either, where I ultimately accumulated several accomplishments! Why did I doubt a competence that I kept verifying over and over again?
When I say “a person with self-doubt”, what do you imagine? A timid person, anxiously wringing their hands and never sure of themselves? That’s not how self-doubt presented itself in me, and I don’t believe that’s how it shows up in most of us. My self-doubt was a secret I kept even from myself. A little mouse, gnawing away at the cables behind the walls. It was not satisfied by reassurances, praise, or even rankings in the city paper. Most of the time, it went unnoticed. Occasionally it would get tested, and that’s where the frayed cables strained to hold on.
Have you ever looked for a job? Not everyone has, at least not in the way of scanning through job postings, writing cover letters, tweaking a resumé, applying and interviewing. If you haven’t, maybe you’ve asked for a raise or a promotion. These are gut-wrenching exercises in existentialism: who am I? What am I actually good at? AM I really good at it? How can I prove I’m good at it? What else could I be good at? It’s exhausting.
No matter how much confidence I have in my skills at the outset, the test is wearing, and now I think I know why: I hook up my wagon to my skills. As if the things on the resumé, the things I am good at, ARE me. Well, they’re not. Even if I wasn’t trilingual, even if I couldn’t communicate through writing, even if I was disorganized and undisciplined, there is more to me than that. There is more to all of us than the sum of our skills, our intelligence, our talents.
Worrying that I won’t be accepted for who I am, that people will only like and appreciate me if I bring all my skills to the table and am constantly polishing them, is the food my gnawing mouse lives on.
Once, in my 20s, when entertaining people was one of those self-defining skills, a friend released me from that yoke by saying it outright: “Isabel, we’ll still love you even if you don’t entertain us.” What a relief! What a beautiful gift to say that to someone. You don’t need to perform for me. I love you just the way you are. These are words to say to oneself, repeatedly, as needed.
Footnote
*The math I did was that at least one person had to have voted for the 10th best blog, 2 for the #9, 3 for #8, 4 for #7….and 7 people had to have voted for #4, my blog.