I once had confidence when I was young, innocent, understood a lot less, and cared a lot less.    I lost it when I started caring about what other people told me. I became insecure ever since the start of middle school for no reason.    

There is no one telling me to my face that I am imperfect, it is just everyone around me that I am comparing myself to.

It doesn’t help that stress and parents both have great tactics to lower my self esteem. Stress has a way of making me depressed, unhappy, and not smiling. It makes me feel that I will never achieve what I want and I will never accomplish what I need to.   

My parents get stressed, and they get frustrated or pissed, just like any other human being. But they understand this world and its twisted problems better than I do. So they have a right to try and help me learn what I’m doing wrong and fix that. But sometimes, they’re delivery doesn’t help in the way they think it will. They take out their frustration on me, they remind me even more than the stress that I am so imperfect, so undeserving, and just make me feel terrible at times.

This leads me to my philosophy about confidence. Confidence is like a present or gift, but to be able to use it to its full potential, you have to work on it. You have to build self-trust over time, first by learning to love and accept yourself. Then by finding what you are good in, building skills on top of that, and learning how the world works along the way, you will eventually come to have faith and confidence in yourself.

But that same confidence could also end up like a gift that ends up in the corner of the storage room for years, never used, never opened, never recognized for its usefulness. That gift could be the best thing in the world, the one thing you need the most, but you would never realize it until it’s opened. It’s the same with confidence. You’ll always need it to be able to hold yourself up, but you will never realize how important it is until you actually try to utilize it.

I do believe that confidence is something anyone and everyone is born with, that they have to practice having it so that they eventually can utilize it. But I also believe that it is a key to being able to survive in a world like this. I don’t know much about this world, but I know that I don’t like most of it, and most of it won’t like me. The world won’t spoon feed me the answers to my problems. It definitely won’t help me back up when I stumble. This leads me to believe that confidence is important so that others can’t take advantage over you, and that you won’t fall down from hardships as easily.