Fun fact about myself – I only just recently acquired the skill of self-confidence. It’s a feeling of freedom juxtaposed with a little bit of guilt, because you feel like you’re overstepping the boundary between healthy self-affirmation and sheer, unadulterated vanity, and lemme tell you: in the grand racecourse of my self-esteem that is an unfairly thin line. Anyway, getting straight to the point…
Sometimes I get a little scared when things are going beautifully, as if I’m being duped. That all my accomplishments are doled out to me in accordance to a quota of pity. …it’s quite a petty thing to be worried about but I’ve spent so much of my life lowering my expectations that peeking my head out of my self-made hole and seeing a word full of opportunities for me, feasible opportunities within my grasp is…too good to be true.
Even now I don’t trust myself with all these successes. It’s just hard for me to believe that someone with mediocre grades for quite some time in her life can be…world-class. That I managed to literally top the entire country in my Sociology exam last year still feels like a delusion.
I was talking to my best friend, Alyssa, about sociology and we reached the conclusion that I couldn’t fail sociology if I were dead. And I said something about being good at sociology, really good, and then I felt like I had to follow up by apologizing for my “immodesty”. It felt both good and bad to be…vain. It’s not really the right word to use, but that’s how it felt in my head.
I hope one day I can reach a point where I can be unabashedly proud of myself. I think I’m getting there, albeit slowly and haltingly. But at least there haven’t been any sudden depressions in that little corporate chart that is my psyche and for what it’s worth, I’m doing my best to ensure that that remains the trend.
Neiha Lasharie 