Discovering Your True Self First
I wanted to write about building confidence, but I think I’d rather get vulnerable instead.
I’ve had this conversation with a few people before, so I know I’m not the only one.
When I was in some of the deepest, darkest parts of my addiction, I was also at the height of my grandiose delusions. Like literal delusions. But it’s funny how many of those have followed me into sobriety … they just look a little different.
I had myself convinced that I was going to BE something. I was going to make it big. I would get high, and pour myself into these projects that were either going to make me rich, famous, or both. I wanted to be a figure of sorts. I wanted people to know me, and actually care what I had to say.
It actually had very little to do with actually wanting to be famous, I wanted to be HEARD. (This is still true.)
The problem was, I was too far fucked to actually produce anything meaningful.
I’d start on some project (at one point I even paid for a year of Shopify for my “merch.”) and then I would run into some obstacle and let it overrule everything else. I never pushed past whatever it was that had me stuck. Pretty much just said, “fuck it, I’ll figure it out later,” but later never came. Instead I would just repeat the process with something else.
Here’s where it gets kind of funny.
All that shit I wanted to do while I was high, and believed so deeply I could achieve, somehow I’ve circled back to wanting those things. Just through a lens of sobriety.
The insane belief an addict has in themselves is astounding. Both miserable and so deeply delusional that everything feels possible. What do you mean I can’t just write a book? What do you mean I can’t just start a nonprofit? WHAT DO YOU MEAN I CAN’T??
There was no “can’t” being high.
And then I got clean. And self doubt and shame and disbelief crawled into my belly like a snake. It twisted its way around my spine and held me locked in a state of paralysis. All there was, was “can’t can’t can’t.”
Going from believing I could do anything when I couldn’t even keep myself upright, to being fully functional and believing myself capable of nothing was a whole fucking shock on its own.
I had to relearn from the ground up how to believe in myself again. I had to learn how to bear the shame and the shit that I did, the pain that I caused, and somehow reconcile that the person who did those things can ALSO be the person that touches the hearts of others.
It’s a wild fucking journey that doesn’t make sense a majority of the time. But here we are.
We don’t just wake up one day confident fucking rockstars. We have to build it, one brick at a time. One teeny tiny baby step at a time.
We have to learn how to trust ourselves again. How to not just make promises, but how to keep them. And we have to do it a million and one times before it finally starts to mean something.
Whatever it is that you’ve been through in your life, whatever it is that’s holding you back from becoming the person you know you’re capable of being … let it go.
That, in my personal opinion, is the first step to building confidence. It doesn’t matter if you have a story like mine, or if you’ve lived a completely different kind of life. Confidence is something so many of us struggle with, regardless of our histories.
But we all have something tying us down. We all have something that is keeping us small.
Find what that is, and fucking smash the shit out of it.
Learn how to use your voice, even if only with yourself. Learn how to tell the difference between reality, and your brain straight up lying to you. (It does that a lot more than you think.)
This whole journey?? Most of us are just trying our best. That’s all we can really ask for. We can look for all the right things to say and all the perfect skills to learn, but at the end of the day the most important thing is being authentic to yourself.
Learn YOU.
TRUST you.
That’s where you’ll find your confidence.