The meaning of confidence
I think that we were braver when we were children.
My Mom would dress me in cute dresses as a child, and I would pose confidently in front of my Dad wielding the camera.
But as I grew older and started elementary school, I grew bigger, my hair curlier and frizzier; with this came grew my awareness of my weight and outer appearance.
Because I thought that being pleasant-looking wouldn’t be for me as much as it was for my other friends and classmates, I put all my effort in things that interested me like writing and drawing.
I didn’t do or think that consciously, but in hindsight…
Maybe my younger version thought along the lines of “If I couldn’t be pretty, then maybe I could be a good writer and artist.”
I silently berate myself for thinking that outer beauty is what only mattered…
In second year of high school, I put up my deviantArt account. I was 14 years old.
My deviantArt before!
I can still remember how proud I was of myself for getting to learn Adobe Photoshop and draw digitally. I was thankful too for my Mom and Dad who have always been supportive and who have nurtured my love for the arts. (And I am thankful and will always be thankful).
I was a quiet child, and I still am today.
I can express myself more through the written word and illustrations. It’s the best way to know me, I guess, and it’s what I’m good at too, even if I may think and feel otherwise sometimes when the voice of my inner critic and doubts arise.
If things like that can shatter one’s beliefs, what more could anonymous hurtful remarks do to a 14-year-old’s heart?
In three of the artworks I uploaded in my gallery before, someone anonymous commented things like “Mediocre trash” to them.
Charlie’s Little Magic. Charlie is one of my original characters from before!
I used a lot of smileys… Haha!
I felt sick reading the comments on this. I’m surprised too with what I wrote in the description: how “I spent my whole life on this.” It may be an exaggeration but knowing myself, it meant that I put all my heart and effort into creating and finishing it. I felt warm and troubled, as if the anonymous person were there with us in our home, and he was laughing at me.
This was in 2008, and some people weren’t too kind… Although today, I still see posts from friends or other people of getting hateful remarks. Instead of putting down others, why couldn’t we just be constructive and help one another up?
In retrospect, that incident was distressing for me. The Internet was so young then, and getting to talk with people online was still new. Of course it would be disturbing for people who were young and hopeful like I was to receive those kinds of things from strangers.
I remember telling my Mom about the deviantArt comments, and I felt comforted when she told me to frame it like a challenge, but a challenge that wasn’t fueled by spite or anything negative but by focusing on just getting better.
However, that still put a dent on my self-confidence.
I’ve always had low self-esteem.
High school, college, work…
It was only in recent years that I started to be more sure of myself but not in a prideful way.
I’ve always thought that the word confidence wasn’t good. Being confident wasn’t something that I aspired to be, because I thought that if I were more confident, then it would make me arrogant and full of myself.
Someone I look up to and helps me process my feelings told observed that when I receive kind words, I would deflect them and would pass it back to the person who said these kind words. It was as if I felt that I didn’t deserve those kind words.
Instead of putting up a shield, she said I could try to say receive the kindness and say thank you instead.
In June 2015, my Dad, my cousin Jango, and I went hiking in Red Rock Canyon in Nevada’s Mojave Desert. It’s this magnificent display of red sandstone peaks that could easily make you feel as if you’re on Mars. It was summer then, and the weather was dry.
I learned something then about confidence when we were going through the hiking trails. We needed to leap from one rock to another. As I was going to jump to another rock, I had a thought: I should be confident where my feet would land. I should be confident in the steps I am going to take, I should be sure that I won’t slip or fall or twist my ankle—the same way that I should be confident in the place that I was going to land on.
Ever since, in other hiking adventures with my family, I kept that lesson of confidence.
In art too, you can see if someone is confident by the way lines and strokes look.
Although it takes time (I took so much time too to just be brazen in drawing lines and forms!), you’ll eventually get the hang of it. Come to think of it now, I feel that the best example of confidence in drawing is when we were children when we had paintbrushes and pastels and markers and chalk in our hands! I go back to my opening sentence: I think that we were braver when we were children. You could see how much we enjoyed just painting streaks of color onto paper (and walls?).
And then while we grew more and became conscious of technique, shadows, highlights, anatomy, styles, and whatnot, and we become more careful and calculated.
In my job from 2013 to today, I’ve been in marketing.
In college, I didn’t understand it so much, but with thanks to my supervisors and colleagues, I was able to learn. I’m not confident in it in terms of knowledge and application as much as others who really took marketing as their course, but I know that I try my hardest to learn.
Earlier I checked the origins of the word ‘confidence.’
I was surprised with what I found.
Confidence came from the Latin word 'confidere’ which meant “have full trust.”
I always associated confidence with arrogance.
Now I learned its true meaning.
To be confident is to have full trust in yourself.
(Not just trust, but full trust).
The word here isn’t pride or a high opinion—it’s trust.
Although it may take a while to be confident in our own skills and accomplishments, maybe we can be confident in other things:
that we can learn whatever it is we need to learn…
that we can make amends and do better…
that you can get through your ordeals…
that we can leap from one rock to another…
and that we can create beautiful, true, and honest art the same way we did when we were younger and braver.