Who Dares, Wins

"You need to have more confidence in yourself."

That phrase keeps coming back to haunt me, everywhere I go. My mom, my friends, everyone seems to be saying it.

Confidence.

Something someone has, and someone else doesn't, and the only difference between the two seems to be that one has it and one doesn't, and that seems to separate them into their respective fates.

To believe in yourself, that must be something. To have great ideas, to know they're worthwhile, then seeing yourself as worthwhile enough to implement them. That must be an experience worth anything. All I know is this, the most frustrating thing is to have great ideas and not be able to find anyone who's worthy of them, who will believe in them like you do, and implement them.

It's not that I'm afraid of the work. No, that isn't it at all. It's that I see other works I've done, fallen into the dust of history, so not even a passerby will notice them by the wayside.

Where does one come by confidence, that feeling that one can do something and do it well. I used to be bubbling over with it. I used to walk into a room and captain it, steer it wherever I willed, and it went. That was the rudder confidence used to give me.

It was my true strength, you see. I'm a person of large stature, and I've always felt proud of it, but my real strength was confidence. The ability to believe in myself when nobody else did.

It got me leads in plays my first year in High School and College. I was good at performing, and I didn't care if anyone else was too, because I knew that if I wasn't good enough, then I would get better and shortly would be.

Now I have to sell any ideas I have to someone else before I can ever believe in it.

To live in the past is to lose the present, they say, but I say sometimes the answers lie in the past. In what we were.

I was a Theater student, then. Son of the stage, walker on the boards. I could be anyone I wanted to be. It was all one big game of pretend. One day I started pretending in real life, too. I kept pretending until suddenly I hit on who I had always wanted to be.

I don't think most people ever experience what it's like to be who you've always wanted to be. I highly recommend it, if you ever find yourself in a place to try. But at the same time I must issue it with a warning. Once you become someone you admire, that you've always wanted to be, once you lose that person, it's as keen a loss as you've ever felt. It's like standing above your own grave.

Disturbing image, isn't it?

Show me the way back to confidence, o universe in which I dwell, and I will lead as I did once, and follow as I did once.