Confidence

I've been thinking about confidence lately. Cojones, if you will.

It's hard to be confident when nobody likes people who aren't confident. It's a bit unfortunate, but sometimes you need to pit in a bit of effort to get the positive feedback ball rolling in your favor.

I've been thinking about what gives me confidence. I think I have a few strategies.
The first is a look at statistics. I believe that all people are worthy of being loved and get to have desires and should be able to think about themselves sometimes, and very nearly everyone can make a positive contribution to society as long as they're not preventing other people from contributing to society. Even if they're literally worse at everything than every other person. It's an economics thing. And when all people are  in their own way worthy, I find it extremely unlikely that I am somehow that marvel of probability that is not worthy of these things.
The second comes from introspection. I think about what I feel and what I want and I think about my actions (before and while I perform them) and (hopefully) find my actions justified.

Of course, it's a lot harder to be confident at School where everyone is super cool and does all this awesome shit and people are more like the person I want to be than I am. But then I come back home and the people are just like they were in high school and I have to wonder if they're like that all the time or just because they're back home too.

I had pretty low self-esteem back in my high school days. Maybe everyone did. Eventually I got over it. Sometimes when I experience personal growth, I get annoyed that other people have not experienced the same kind of growth. It's not reasonable, but I almost feel like they're trying to drag me back to darker, less enlightened days. But not exactly like that. Maybe they just remind me of how I used to be when I rejected that version to move forward. I feel no pity for them. I'm not sure. Maybe I think that because I got over it they should too. Or maybe I distance myself from them in the same way I distanced myself from Past Me. I'm not really sure. All I know is that sometimes I think that maybe I should be feeling sorry for some person and I check and find that I am not feeling even a little bit sorry for them.

I said something that surprised me the other day. I spoke of my high school iterations. I like that. I like the idea that all the Past Me's are just versions which are constantly being improved. It's like I can love those fuckups because they were the necessary steps to get to Current Me instead of hating them for being fuckups.