“Bullshit Confidence” is a term that I started using a couple of years ago. It’s been a fitting description of certain aspects of my life as I’ve navigated through anxiety and depression. Bullshit confidence is the fabricated pride you feel in the things that you’re afraid of being bad at. It’s an excuse to not try harder. It’s a cop-out to save yourself from failure. Summed up, bullshit confidence is your ego’s fear of being vulnerable.
When you have the low confidence and a poor self-image that usually come with anxiety and depression, your ego will do anything to hide those feelings from yourself and the rest of the world. This includes, lying to hide weaknesses, distracting yourself from effort needed to improve your quality of life, and making excuses for not trying. You’ll compare yourself to people in similar situations and pick them apart as a way to feel better about yourself. For example, you might think, “Well, at least I’m not as messed up as that person.” Instead of focusing on getting better, you hover near the bottom, so long as there’s someone worse off and further below you. Misery loves company. Especially, when their misery is worse than yours. It ensures you have someone to compare yourself to when you self-loathe. These are all coping mechanisms used to guarantee that you don’t have to put in that extra, painful effort to become a stronger person. You get to stay in your depressing, yet oddly comfortable hole. And I say comfortable, because at the time, it feels more comfortable to give up than it does to face the repetitive, crushing failures that come along with transforming into a new person. Giving up is always the easier option, but also the least beneficial to your survival.
I spent years pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Fear of judgement and failure suffocated my true self. So, who am I, now that I know this? Well, like most people, I have jobs, relationships, beliefs, outlooks, values, opinions, goals, history, and interests, but these are all evolving and impermanent. None of these attributes define me. In fact, nothing defines me. If I am to know myself better than anyone else, but also admit that I do not truly know myself. And, if the opinions of others are fragmented and uneducated, then surely, I’m nobody. I think we’re all nobodies. We just like to pretend that we know who we are and what we’re doing here. And, some of us are deeper into that game than others. These people have been conditioned and misled into believing that money, possessions, or hierarchical titles make them better than others. Some of us need to feel important. And it’s usually because we’re hiding from something else.
False importance to overcompensate for our weaknesses is just another egoic protective measure. If you hear a lie enough times, you just might start believing it. And convincing yourself that you’re a big shot, when deep down you feel like a loser, is like giving cake to a four-year-old. One taste, and like a trapped eagle, that kid is kicking and screaming for more. Soon, you’re so wrapped up in a ball of lies that you have nowhere left to go. Your walls will eventually crumble, and you’ll be left out in the open, naked, vulnerable, and exposed for the fraud that you are. Sounds scary, right? It is. What you thought was your identity is being washed away at an alarming rate. You’re frantically running down a beach while the raging floodwaters of an angry river carry your old self away. All the while, you’re being found out by those around you. Which means, you’re most likely in preservation mode. As you start to understand that you’re not who you thought you were, the people around you are thinking similarly. This may cause rifts and changes to the people you want to connect to, and the people who want to connect to you. It’s chaos. Your world has been flipped upside down and it’s like you’ve been put into someone else’s body. Try not to worry. Your bullshit confidence was the build-up to the storm. The crumbling of your protective wall was the storm itself. And, as all storms pass, soon this will too. This is where you get to rebuild something truer and more stable.
Truth. It’s ugly sometimes. That’s the very reason we hide from it. It’s painstaking to admit that you’re not good enough, smart enough, or strong enough. Honesty is elusive when you have to brutally confront your own shortcomings. You’ll attempt to fall back to old routines and thought patterns as your ego coddles you and rubs your back. You’ll try your best to deny the new information about who you were trying to be. But this time, you have no shelter to protect you. It’s just you, your ego, the biting wind and pissing rain. Thrive or perish.
Like any newborn, your beginning will be weak. You’ll stand feebly, shivering and scared. You’ll doubt your mind and your actions. There will be times when you desperately wish you could go back to old, comfortable memories. But, push forward. The old you is no more. They drowned in that raging river. That part of you will never return. In the words of Nelson Mandela;
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
As I wrote this blog post, I had to ask myself, do I still have bullshit confidence? And honestly, the answer to that is yes, to a degree. But now, it’s serves a more positive purpose. After years of depression and anxiety, my confidence is still in a stage of growth. My bullshit confidence is a temporary and more scarce measure to lay a foundation for true confidence. I lie to myself in order to gain the strength to face my challenges, instead of merely pretending and hiding from failure. When I run, I tell myself that I can reach a certain distance or best an old time, even though I know I can’t yet. I gets me off my ass and into my running shoes. And even though I fail sometimes, I usually do better than I previously thought. I now have an obligation and accountability to prove to myself that I can do what I say I can. And, if I try and fail, I still know that I put my best effort in and that I need to try again. My bullshit confidence is just a steppingstone as I gain more victories and prove my weaker, former self wrong each day. My victories serve no one but myself. If I’m not willing to keep myself accountable, then my old self still lives inside of me. And that’s not a person or place I want to return to.
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