Confidence

This is a word that comes up on my blog time and time again and in fact in conversation with me too. I seem to somehow come across as this confident, extroverted person who means business and even in the throes of an anxiety disorder I exude this to others. I have literally no idea how. You see, deep down, in fact not that deep, you barely even need to scratch the surface most days, I’m a bundle of nerves, worries and self-doubt. I have absolutely no idea how I manage to cover this up and yet time and time again I’m described as confident despite feeling anything but. I don’t overly mind this but I do sometimes worry, especially when I’m doing videos, that people think that I’m somehow different from them because although I’m ill, I’m still confident, but this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although I’m good at talking and am known for my inability to shut up, ever, I spend a lot of time worrying about it, analysing what I’ve said afterwards and time just rolling my eyes at myself and wishing I’d said something different or just stopped talking altogether. I annoy myself often and yet somehow I can’t stop and carry on talking rubbish. Just because I talk a lot and am viewed as loud doesn’t mean that I have any self-assurance about the value of what I’m saying or my authority to say it.

You probably wouldn’t believe the amount of time that I spend comparing myself to others and wishing I was different. If I spent half of that amount of time actually doing something productive or changing myself in a specific way then chances are I’d be more like the people I so admire. But I’m never sure in what way to even change, what bits to add, what bits to take away, and so I just continue to compare and wish I was more like them. It probably sounds ridiculous and I always feel that way when I talk to people about it in my real life but I don’t even feel like I’m ill in the right way. There seem to be acceptable ways of being ill and unacceptable ways and I’m pretty sure that I’m mostly in the latter camp. I’m not half as productive or effective as the majority of people I know who are mentally ill and in terms of social media advocation, I’m really low down. I don’t have the energy, capacity or will power to stick to a posting schedule and I have literally no idea how other bloggers and mental health advocates manage to create the sheer volume of content that they do. I often look at the list of posts that I’ve published for ideas and come to a halt because I just don’t know what to write about anymore, I’ve done the big and obvious things like describing what it’s like to live with depression and anxiety, what my appointments with my psychiatrist have been like and sharing updates when I’ve had big positive or negative changes in my health but apart from that my ideas seem to have run out. For someone who absolutely always has something to say, I seem to have a lot less to write than I’d like to admit.

I often wonder why this is and I think it’s because of the topic of this exact post – confidence. So often, I’ll talk myself out of even starting a post because I question it or decide that no one will care or I won’t do the topic justice. I spend a colossal amount of time now wondering who the hell I think I am and why anyone would care what I have to say when I’m one tiny voice in a sea of much more competent bloggers. They are able to function, even to make a career out of this, to get paid for their publishing, create regular content to an actual schedule and even go viral! I know it’s silly to be competitive about blogging but I tend to wonder what I’m doing wrong and what I could change in order to reach more people or make more of an impact. I’m not interested in fame or getting rich from this but I’m desperate to make a bigger and more meaningful difference than I currently am and I can never work out an effective way of doing so. We all go through blips of low confidence and second-guess ourselves but I seem to be the complete opposite and have blips of belief in myself followed by weeks and months of not even wanting to try because I just know that I’m not capable and feel like I’ve got nothing valuable to say. Lack of confidence regularly goes hand in hand with setting the bar increasingly high and so now I feel extreme pressure to post something really valuable and worthwhile because it’s been such a long time between each post and so I really need to share something worthy of people bothering to read it. The more I think like that, the harder it is to conjure up an idea that could possibly match those criteria and hence I go for months at a time of posting nothing because nothing ever makes the cut. I even start posts and they just get lost in a drafts folder, often never to be seen again. I wish I wasn’t such a perfectionist and would just share more frequently in the hopes that doing so would help me get beyond this. I try to talk myself into sharing some of the posts that I don’t think are up to scratch or finishing off some of the half-written drafts that I’ve lost count of the number of. I get to the point of thinking that any video, no matter how random or disjointed would be better than sharing absolutely nothing but then I get whatever the YouTube equivalent of stage fright is and just can’t be coherent. It’s a real nightmare! I’m lonely, I’m isolated and I know I’m one of what must be thousands of people in the world who feel the same way. I want to be able to voice our experience, to shine a light on what it’s like and to get some of the thoughts that spend hours swirling round and round in my head, out and into the world in the hopes that it might quieten my mind just a little and have at least one of you reading or watching saying “hey, that happens to me too, I’m not alone”. But the lack of confidence renders me mute. You’re probably sat reading this half shouting at the screen that it clearly doesn’t and this must be a lie because there you are reading a post that I’ve written but this was actually written ages ago and it’s taken until now to muster up the courage to post it. This lack of confidence isn’t an act and it’s something that try as I might, I’ve not won the battle with for over a year and I see no end to that arriving anytime soon. I question myself constantly, I try to talk myself into posting something, anything, and yet the vast majority of the time I don’t even get as far as starting before I’ve talked myself out of it and decided it’s pointless and no one would be interested anyway. Once I finally have written something I usually feel that it’s not coherent, is far too negative or just sounds whiny and after getting a particularly hurtful comment from someone I know after sharing one of my last blog posts, my confidence is even lower and I second-guess myself even more.

My hope in posting this post, albeit quite late, is that it might spur me on with continuing rather than starting again. I continually try to not leave huge breaks between posts and then time just passes by and my anxiety about needing to post something spectacular increases to an unbearable point. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve opened this document and wanted to just post it on my blog and then chickened out. Normally when this happens I’ll get a friend or family member to read it and check it’s ok and get them to make suggestions for edits but I don’t even have the confidence to do that. I finally asked my partner earlier in the week to read this but he forgot and I’ve not been brave enough to ask him since. He never judges me and always tries to boost my confidence but I’m so worried this is bad or whiny that I can’t face getting someone to check. By the time this is posted I’ll have almost certainly had to psych myself up, hold my breath and mentally scream at myself to just hit the damn ‘publish’ button and I’ll probably feel sick for ages afterwards waiting to see what reaction it gets and whether I’m going to be criticised again. I think I’ll always be amazed when people describe me as confident when a constant stream of all of this is permanently running through my mind.

I normally try to end posts on a poignant note but I’m all out of those. I’ll try to be back soon with more posts and videos. If you have any suggestions or requests then do let me know in the comments or via the contact me tab where you can contact me privately. I don’t have any ideas for future posts at the moment so any ideas are gratefully received.