what makes me confident

i've spent 14 months 16 days and 4 minutes searching for this answer.

i thought what made me confident was the repetition of doing scary things like approaching strangers and doing that over and over again. i thought it was just me.

this 14 month old thought persisted in my head until i realized that it is not this repetition that made me confident. i would love to make this story more suspenseful and have a nice build up but i don't know how to do that right now so i'm just going to spit out the answer.

i realized a sense of belonging and being around those people made me confident. i keep thinking back to when i felt the most confident, in college after crossing into my fraternity. i was with a community where i felt accepted, where i socialized often and met new people constantly, where i was part of something aside from myself, and where i had worked hard to get into. all those factors played into my confidence. i realized this when i went back to california and just felt different. felt like a me that i was missing. he died in the big city. well not really, but he just hasn't been fully rediscovered.

i feel confident in the work setting where everyone is part of the community and openly converses. i just don't feel that outside.

there is more to this such as items like: expressing insecurities and being vulnerable, being worldly and healthy, hanging out with others, having goals and committing to them when they get hard. i still need to work on those, but for now this is good.

the end.

i'm going to start writing back in my blog, likely in shorter and non fleshed out ideas just like this post. i've abandoned this site because i would have quick thoughts that i felt weren't fully fleshed out and never posted them. then i just stopped writing entirely and want to get back into it.