The Sine Wave of Self-Worth

               I’m a confident person. I know my strengths and I know my worth. I hold my head high when I speak, and it’s usually enough to get me by—even if I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’m kind, smart, friendly, and resourceful; and even when I’m not, I try my best to be. I’m confident because I believe in myself, and because I know I have things to believe in.

               Now, having said all that: I’m the most insecure person I know. I’m painfully aware of my weaknesses, always paranoid that they will eventually overshadow anything good in me. There are days where I genuinely wonder if I have even a single redeemable quality. And though today I could write the paragraph before this one, I know on a different day I would have rejected every single one of those notions in cold blood.

               So how is this possible? How can I have such opposing mentalities? As a teenager, I know I’m not alone. How many of us hate ourselves one day, only to wake up feeling better than everyone we know on the next? Angsty, moody, overdramatic, we are told. And usually, this reasoning does have some truth to it. Take school, for instance, where my cycle of anxiety is just part of the routine by now. My teacher assigns a project, I work diligently and rationally on it for days—with a healthy amount of procrastination, of course—start freaking out the second after I turn it in, go down a mental spiral of panicking that this one assignment will singlehandedly doom my whole grade, by extension my college admissions, and by extension my whole life, and get back my grade (spoiler alert: I got an A) only to realize I was fine the whole time.

               These insecurities can be ridiculous, for sure, even unfounded at times. But I still have them. As many times as I’ve gone down the same train of thought, and as many times as I’ve looked back at myself and rolled my eyes, I still have them. Am I a more extreme case on the spectrum? Probably. But we all have these ups and downs, and if left unattended, they can cause real harm in the long-term.

               I don’t have a magical way to become a “confident person” overnight. But that’s my point. There is no such thing as a “confident person,” just like there is no such thing as an “insecure person.” No one person should be defined by either their moments of confidence or their spells of insecurity. Some of us are just better actors than others!

               What I will say is this: I don’t feel the need to put on a façade that I have my life together when I don’t, and you shouldn’t either. I’d rather focus my energy on working through my insecurities than doing everything I can to pretend like they don’t exist. I’m not perfect; very far from it. But to me, confidence isn’t reaching for some hypothetical, hyper-idealized version of yourself. Confidence is self-awareness. It’s knowing, even in your most heightened moments of insecurity, that feeling unworthy doesn’t make you unworthy.

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