Vocabulary.com defines confidence as “a feeling of trust and firm belief in yourself or others.” Trust and firm belief in myself— to me, these two concepts have always been amorphous. And in those rare moments when I think I’ve solidified the intangible, when I think I’ve successfully captured the nebulous strands and microcosms of confidence, when I—with great hast—have stuffed them into a jar and then sat and stared, waiting for the invisible to become visible, waiting for trust and belief to assume a shape that I can wear on my chest like a badge, just then— they become elusive as a ghost.
Maybe confidence is ambiguous by necessity. Perhaps is it a shape-shifter, evolving ceaselessly through the gradations between hubris and humility. I can recall moments when I needed confidence in varying degrees. When I was in high school, I chopped off my hair. (Boldness.) In my twenties, I broke up with my high school boyfriend. (Courage.) In my early thirties, I went bungee jumping. (Daring.) Every situation calls for a particular mode.
Confidence is inconsistent. It comes in small bursts like little Popeyes popping cans of spinach down their throats. Sometimes that’s exactly how I feel: as though there are thousands of little Popeyes living on the delicate fibers of my nervous system.
I need those Popeyes. I need them as I stand before a classroom of teenagers every day to deliver a lesson. As a graduate student, I need them when I raise my hand to comment or ask a question or silently admit that I didn’t finish the required reading. I need the confidence to deploy honesty where treachery has claimed swaths of my consciousness. I need those Popeyes to spook the little devil on my left shoulder, to shake him so hard that he loses his bravado as the little angel to my right spreads his wings and adjusts his halo.
In college, I majored in music and would often get laryngitis right before my recitals. “Stress,” my professor would tell me, “It’s always stress.” I lacked the confidence to sing a solo in front of an audience. I couldn’t control my knees from wobbling and my hands from jittering. Years later, there are still moments when I can smell that brand of fear wafting from a cesspool somewhere in my chest. It is a cavity so deep that the little devil dare not approach it in fear that he might plummet with no chance of returning because unlike the angel, he doesn’t have wings. Sometimes I wonder if there is enough confidence in the universe to fill that hole of doubt and uncertainty. Or do I continue to live with it, avoiding the edge of the cliff? Or if I must stand on its edge, how do I keep myself from looking down?
I wish that I could summon confidence unequivocally, whenever I feel slighted, weak, ashamed. But confidence is mercurial. It shows up at odd, unpredictable moments depending on the time and the table at which I am sitting; depending on the conversation surrounding the meal; depending on the connotations and nuances hovering above the arugula salad and dinner rolls. Maybe it’s all relative. One man’s confidence is another man’s cowardice. Is Kanye West confident, cocky, or cowardly? Was Marilyn Monroe confident as she swallowed the pills? Was she confident that she would die?
If confidence is something you earn by falling on your face, getting up, and realizing you’re okay; or shedding a certain number of tears, burning a certain amount of calories, or parting ways with a certain number of lovers—then most people should feel confident in their abilities to live successfully. To love fully. To pursue happiness thoroughly. To sustain lives of little stress and immense joy. But the prescription drug commercials nestled between scenes of the Dr. Phil Show prove otherwise.
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