Badassery Magazine February 2018 Issue 21 | Page 31

C onfidence is controver- sial. Some people think it’s just pure ego, (who does she think she is!?). Most of us stay stuck in the “Fake it till you make it” without ever quite “making it”. That was totally me for the lon- gest time. This is the story of how I made it over the elusive rainbow. Oh, and no, it’s not ego, it’s Divine awareness. But I won’t get into that here. my thoughts were unruly tod- dlers, I told myself that anytime a negative thought would roll up in my self-talk that I would simply distract it, like a damn ninja. And much to my surprise, it WORKED! “You are worthless and stupid, no one wants to hear you talk!” turned into “Holy shit, kittens are adorable right!? Oh, also, you don’t suck that bad.” And I called it a WIN! With time I got better at it! I start- ed judging myself less and loving myself more, even when it didn’t make sense or seem necessary to love myself (kinda like being proud of a baby who poops) but it was still a LOT of work… Then shit got REAL when my boy was struggling with his place in the world… he would say things to me like “Why do Hi! My name is Amber, and I am confident AF! But I haven’t always been. In fact, I was one of the most painfully shy people I’ve ever seen in real life, oh yeah, and I HATED myself! Not in the typical way that so many women do, like legit H-A- T-E. Sure severe depression had a lot to do with it, I also believed that I just was an awful person who de- served to suffer… So that sucked… One day while being particularly mean to myself (yelling at my arms in the mirror) I heard it… a voice that clearly said, “Are you real- ly going to keep hating her for the rest of her life?!” Woah. What was THAT!? Who the fuck said that and where did they come from? This, my friends, was a life-chang- ing moment. I knew as soon as I heard the voice that I, in fact, could not continue with the hatred. I. Just. Couldn’t. I had NO idea how to NOT hate myself… I was GOOD at it. It was my constant companion, but I knew in that moment that if I ever found out that my son spoke to himself the way I was speaking to myself I would be DEVASTAT- ED, so I committed to myself to stop. I decided to try to pretend that 30