You Don't Have To Screw People Over To Survive

Sisyphus by Franz Von Stuck

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the word -confidence-. When I tried to take the advice of people around me--my biological aunt, my counselours at the group home--when I would practice being confident, I felt, and I think the feeling was not only accurate but mutual, that I was not behaving confidently but arrogantly. I was centered on my own needs, and my own will to assert myself, and whenever I was aware of myself acting this way, I felt ashamed and filthy and deeply sorrowed that I had transgressed the dignity of another person.

And I am competitive, but I was always reeling that in, because I realized I didn’t have a healthy expression of it in any area outside of artwork and my music. In those areas, I didn’t care if anyone was better than me at it; I was just happy to be able to do it. And usually that was a solitary work. Other people’s better ability in that gave me something to strive for, and I genuinely appreciated the artist’s ability and used it as a beacon.

I realized that somehow my wires got crossed, and I identified competitiveness with a striving to be paid attention to. And in my world that was a very dangerous game. I think I have a healthy expression of competitiveness regarding my art. When I expressed competitiveness outside of art, it was linked to a fear and insecurity that I was not good enough, that I could be abandoned, that I could be relegated to the basement, that I could die.

There was someone I needed to please in order to be deemed worthy of life in their realm.

But pleasing them meant I had to die.

But in that realm that I grew up in, if I showed any true spark of life, of ability, this would get sabotaged and/or belittled or punished.

So in this case, failing was survival.For most of my life until I was fourteen, I lived in abject fear that my life would be taken from me, coupled with the certainty that there was no worth to my life… The day I learned that the word Confidence meant ‘with faith’ marked a turning point for me. Sincerely, I did not know how to live with faith, but I would think of it whenever I tried to be confident so as not to trepass others, and to figure out how to make my way in the world.

Next Week: How A Traffic Life Taught Me To Have Faith In The Fact That I Was Alive, and A Real Human Being