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liv asked:"Confidence. You always seem to be really confident, you have a job that requires you to convince clients you're really good at what you do, and you have such a great sense of style, and you throw yourself into acting and readthroughs with gusto. Do you actually feel really confident about putting yourself out there like that, or are you more faking it? In either case, how do you do it?"
So my first reaction on reading this was to think "Well, I am really good at my job, and I'm pretty good at acting these days, so it's quite easy to be confident about them". And then I realised what I'd just thought and laughed at myself a bit, but I think it fairly clearly answers the first part of the question, that I do actually feel really confident at least about some things. So how do I do it? Well, it's not really something I do conciously at all, but I can say something about how it came about...
When I was younger I had very little confidence, especially after my depression started kicking in at around eleven or twelve. I spent my early teens holing myself up in my room, earnestly believing that my only good quality was my academic ability. About the time I moved from school to sixth-form college I started to find friends who actually appeared to like me, and that did start to break into the well of self-loathing that I'd built up, but unfortunately by that time it was deep and dark enough that it wasn't going to disappear easily. I did what I think maybe a lot of people who are just stepping out of that pit do and swung far too far in the opposite direction, pulling on armour of apparent arrogance which wasn't really very nice, although at the time it probably was better than the alternatives.
This continued through my late teens and early 20s, too-ing and fro-ing as I lost and gained ground in my battle with the underlying depression. And then 2003 happened. 2003 was the year that everything in my life went to hell in a handbasket - one of my primary partners got sent to prison, I came within a hair's breath of failing my degree, my mother had a stroke,
denny had his bike accident, and I was sharing a house with a couple who'd just broken up and caught in the middle of all that drama. It was... it was not a good year. And yet I survived. I even managed to come off anti-depressants that year. And as the New Year came around I realised that if I could survive that, there were very few things the world could throw at me that could break me. And ever since then I've had a very strong sense that ultimately everything will be okay.And I think that that deep down sense is what makes it possible for me to be genuinely confident about most things. It's not necessarily that I think I'm awesome at everything, but because I trust that everything will be alright, it's very easy to try, and to take the evidence of how well I do at face value. There are things that I'm not confident about - socialising in large groups, meeting new people, especially meeting new people I might want to date - but I think that's mostly because I haven't done them much lately, and it would probably come back if I threw myself into it.
Sadly this isn't terribly useful for someone else wanting to improve their confidence. On the whole, suffer from crippling depression for about a decade, then just as you're recovering have the universe throw as much appalling crap at you as it possibly can, isn't a strategy I'd recommend. But it worked for me.
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Date: 2014-12-08 07:38 am (UTC)From:no subject
Date: 2014-12-09 12:20 pm (UTC)From:It seems really cool to me that you have that almost unthinking confidence in your professional and acting abilities. And this idea that you've been through hell and survived, even after a really awful adolescence, there's something amazingly powerful about how you depict that.