My Ongoing Odyssey to Confidence

When I find myself in social interactions, my hands become clammy. My heart hammers against my chest, and I become as scared and flustered as a retracted turtle. My stomach becomes infested with hideous moths, who beg for an escape. And it never takes long for my worst thoughts to consume me. Do they notice how uncomfortable I am? Can they hear my racing heartbeat? Why am I so embarrassed?

Although irrational and absurd, these thoughts controlled me. They dictated how I communicated with teachers, store clerks, and even family members. It was my personal monster; devising my worst thoughts. It told me that people judged me for the way I walked, talked, and laughed. It discouraged me from trying new things, like flying a kite, for the fear that people would laugh at the way I ran. It told me everyone was looking at me; not the cute, gazing way where they're infatuated with my beauty, but in a bad way. The kind where everyone is talking amongst themselves saying, "Wow, she smells bad" and "Why is she fidgeting like that?" I was a puppet and the monster was my puppet master, stringing me along with its devious plan of manipulation. The monster forbade me to forget unfavorable memories where I talked, unbeknownst that everyone had already stopped listening, or where I was asked to recite a few paragraphs of a story and fumbled over my words. It made socializing a chore.

With the new year's arrival, millions of people wish upon a star the things they want to achieve, in the hope that the "new year motivation bug" bites them. I am no exception. In the past years, I've told myself, Become vegan. Learn to code. Start a business. Spend less time on the phone, and more time with family. Learn Italian. Learn Portuguese. Learn sign language. Earn straight A's. The list was so overwhelmingly long that I felt like a failure when I couldn't complete all of it.

I said aloud, This year needs to be different. So instead of biting off more than I could chew, I set one goal. Become more confident. Stop listening to whatever was telling me that the way I walked was weird. Stop listening to it when it told me to fidget out of discomfort. Hold my head a little bit higher and be more affirmative in my responses. I told myself, no, nobody can hear my racing heartbeat, because people don't feed off of my awkwardness. No one is whispering as subtle as wind, saying how I smell bad.

At the beginning of my journey, I feigned my confidence. I pretended that I was unafraid, daring, and bold. People say "fake it 'till you make it." And, I truly did. Until one day, when I felt so sure of myself that I didn't even need to fake it.

I began looking in the mirror, reciting positive affirmations, like "I love myself" and "Wow, I look so cute!" After 5 or 10 minutes of talking myself up instead of down, I would be ready for whatever came my way. And little by little, that puppet-mastering monster- the one that fed me a main course of lies, and a side of low self-esteem- became a tiny bit smaller.

Now, I'm not saying that something as debilitating as social anxiety or low confidence can be fixed in less than one month because occasionally, I still get flustered, self-conscious, and worried about what other people are thinking about me. Furthermore, when I feel timid and diffident, I revert to faking my confidence. But I know it's just psychological and that I'm not alone. Luckily, I have the whole year to work on it, because it wouldn't be called a "New Years' Resolution" if I only applied it to one month!