One of my favorite fellow writers is back with a post of her own! This Monday Kira discusses an important lesson regarding self-confidence, enjoy! If you thought of something while reading then let us know, both me and Kira appreciate feedback. Hugs & have a happy Monday❤️

Self-confidence can come from various places. The most effective one, in my opinion, is the one born out of mistakes from which we learn and then grow as people. However, I am not well-versed in this kind as I’ve been a socially awkward person as long as I can remember. I just prefer to play to my strengths. But even playing to your preferred qualities can make things difficult, because if you do only play to these strengths, then you won’t learn much else which can make you mad at yourself in another way.
I have gone outside of my comfort zone multiple times in my life (don’t let the above fool you), and this hasn’t really made me more confident. In actuality, it’s made me more cautious because I feel as though anything that takes “too long” to learn or to get used to, is not worth the effort. Yes, I have seen the error in that multiple times before, and I need to repeat this error in my mind even now.

What also makes it difficult is being seen as a failure, maybe not in your own eyes but maybe in the eyes of your peers, or the peers you’ve been told to befriend, and you parent or legal guardian. If you are an observant person like me, who is also socially awkward, and bad at communication, this can plant a seed of doubt in you. I can remember even as I was younger that my parents could praise me and, in my mind, I thought they weren’t telling the truth. I saw it in the way they acted when they didn’t pay attention to me, their gazes and their sighs that were timed when I tried to speak up but couldn’t. It wasn’t hard to see this, and it really turned me into a sort of monster; someone who wanted to try new things until I didn’t, and someone who cared too much about what others thought.

I vividly remember that I wasn’t good at sports (not a big surprise, they didn’t make sense to me) or any running game, but I did like stories. I liked to talk about things with people, but not my peers. Mostly it was the teachers in school. The ones that didn’t tire from hearing me spout my kid-questions and so on, that is. I did also meet some who tired from it, which were the ones who I still can remember as teachers who I felt weren’t the right ones for me. I still talk about this with a good friend of mine who wants to be a teacher and who I’m confident will inspire a lot of kids to go for their dreams, whatever it is.
Still, my confidence was also rattled by the absence of my parents’ praise. Or their true praise, I should say. After I realized that lies were easy to see through, that they somehow thought that anything they said I would believe, a lot of hat should’ve been me growing into someone better that my young self, somehow slipped through the cracks. I don’t blame them, entirely. I do blame myself for not speaking up, but whenever I tried turning the conversation, I turned into the enemy, as I couldn’t put my thoughts into the proper words to stress my concerns enough. The stutter I sometimes got, didn’t do me any favors to be seen as someone a bit more mature, which in a way was all this revolved around.

There have been moments, in more recent years as I’ve grown up, where I’ve tried to use my new-found voice to talk about my opinions, but then they’ve still been overlooked because from their perspective I still am too childish to have clear opinions. And maybe I do, at least in subjects I don’t know enough about to have strong opinions about, but I also know something about it, and I think it should be enough to have some say in what happens in the world around me. I still try to put something out there, that needs to be mentioned in the discussion.

So, as I’ve established that even if I need to be validated by people to actually feel like I’m doing something right, and that I myself sow the seeds of doubt in myself, I should bring some reassurance. There are those golden moments when those feelings brought by an untrusting nature disappear from my mind, and I let my emotions take the wheel and it doesn’t feel wrong in any sense. It just takes different shapes to get to me in that way. If a teacher tells me I’ve done a good job, I might be happy for a while, but mostly I get a rush of self-confidence from someone new telling me that they recognize a thought I’ve shared (usually one that I’ve felt has been out-of-place in a discussion) and that they think my perspective helped them. That kind of connection has become increasingly difficult t find, but I don’t ever stop looking for it in the subjects that I know are my most comfortable ones and that I want to expand within the group I have found because it’s finally the time for me to come out of that shell that I’ve lived in for much too long.

And even with people I see as very different from me, especially concerning things like self-confidence levels in different areas like big social gatherings and just being alright with your past, I can be alright with sharing my (in my own opinion) most horrifying experiences. This because I know they might understand or somehow debunk my thoughts about it and then make me feel more comfortable with myself, which I usually add on because I believe that’s important to tell someone so that they know I appreciate them.

In conclusion; I like to put my self-confidence in my strengths, the ones I haven’t really trusted in before that is. Putting more thought into art has helped give it a new perspective, and especially writing by myself and about character traits that I have experience in, I notice the reward from my life, that these things that have happened to me are the fuel that gives my work that much more soul and reality which makes it as good as it gets. And people who I give these texts to, who I share my experiences with, and whom I know I can trust with secrets and hopes and dreams that I didn’t even know I had in me, is the biggest step in the right direction I could have taken. The creator of this wonderful blog, who has helped me come out of the shell of my own self-loathing, should have a lot of praise for doing so. The way she can get someone to be themselves thanks to her beautiful words and optimism, it’s what will make the world a better place one day at a time.

There are two things in life that I love more than anything in the world and those are friends and words and yes in that exact order. And that is why I present my dear friend, a co-writer, a fellow artist, Kira ❤️ She is the bright guest star of my blog today and I'm glad that she wrote and wanted to share this brilliant and relatable masterpiece with you guys, my wonderful readers ✨ So enjoy and let the words of Kira speak to you!

I’d like to discuss a subject I think a lot of people (in the First World) might relate to, and the first challenge would be to put a certain label on the problem at hand. I’m talking about people with a less obvious understanding of the word justice, to an extent. The people I feel have gotten their minds around the fact that they might be the cause of a problem but refuse to take any responsibility for it, and who only want themselves to be seen as the victim no matter the case. A good example of this can be taken from a well-known situation of a costumer wanting to see the manager. This example, though I have never been on the other side of it, i.e. a server/cashier, serves to show that these people exist and they want to be heard. The person in the role of the costumer usually has some complaint that is ridiculous, or so the stories I’ve read from other people with experience in customer service have said. Here’s a simple example off the top of my head:

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Costumer: “I want ice in my drink but I don’t want it at the top of the glass, but at the bottom”

Cashier: “… sir/madame that’s against the laws of physics”

Costumer: “Um the costumer is always right, let me speak to your manager”

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I brought this up to maybe show you how it feels to deal with these people in these kinds of situations. The idea of an objective right and wrong is impossible, because the Customer will always assume they are right and should be served.

Now imagine yourselves in everyday situations where these same people need to deal with problems. Perhaps someone you’re friends with is sort of mean to everyone and only wants the group to do what they want to do? What should you do, when your friends seem to not care about it enough to do anything about it, even though they speak ill of them behind their back?

I’ve been in similar situations, and tried to be direct about my approach, but it somehow ended up with me being ostracized from the group because they believed I was too mean. Sometimes this really bothers me, trying to call out these mean people with their ulterior motives, and only getting crap for it. It really drives me out of the situation entirely, since I lose interest in being friends with people who can somehow see through these Customers and still be friend with them for some reason. People who don’t try to change the situation for the better.

Another situation, just to show you how this kind of behavior can reach any aspect of one’s life, would be people who have that idea of themselves that they know better, even as they’re in a situation where they so obviously don’t want to speak the truth in fear of outing themselves as the person in the wrong. Those who lie to others about the situation to make themselves look like they did something right and you did something irrational.

To put this into a scenario so to better explain it, let’s say one of your friends has just moved to the town in which you’re studying. You know the city pretty well, you can recognize the most well-known streets and the malls/cafes/boutiques that are scattered around. The friend who moves in with you doesn’t know the city too well, and you sometimes worry about that since (I mean it’s a big city and there’s been disappearances in the news, although seldom). They don’t always tell you when they’ll be home and when they do, its late at night with not-so-detailed explanations of their whereabout.

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“I’m on Sesame Street” – “close to a building with the toy store on it”

“…” (has no idea what location they’re referring to)

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To paint the best picture let me tell you another story about two sisters. One of them was exactly this person and the story was as I explained earlier. Her sister got upset sometimes because she didn’t understand how worrisome the behavior made her. One time she left without notice again, in the afternoon, and her sister texted her just to ask if she went to the store and if she could buy something for their apartment. She replied that she was meeting someone who sold used dresses on an online flee market, and she left to go get it from them at their apartment. She only gave away the street name she was on and got defensive as the sister tried to get the rest of the address. Fast forward to a few weeks later, at their parents’ house. She had tattled about the exchange to their mother who became irritated at the sister for being too intrusive on her own personal life. Turns out however, that the sister had lied to their mom about where she tried on a dress and told her she went to a clothing store. When the mother was told the truth she paused, and just replied “ok.” And this was the last they spoke of these kinds of things, and there wasn’t going to be another mention of it to ruin their normal family life.

I believe these people need some serious self-reflection if they don’t realize how toxic this sort of behavior is, because they don’t actually seem to notice how it affects the people around them and the people who do comment on it rarely get their voice heard in my experience. I’m sure there are some people who do listen and then whittle down their ego and act more like everyone else. I just wish I could see more people who do stand up for the objectively right side and refuse to let their friends, co-workers and even sisters be allowed to behave in such a childish way.

There is no real solution to this problem, as I have also noted through my attempts at pointing some people out. I only try to face the people I know well enough to know it isn’t behavior that’s linked to a difficult life situation or anything like that, it’s etched into their personality. The only solution there is to this is, to just try to stand them even if they’re close to you like a colleague, a student, or a regular Costumer. And maybe one day they realize what their behavior does to the people around them. Stubbornness should never be underestimated, especially if the people also tend to have some underlying insecurity which fuels their need to be correct.

Kira (Guest writer person)