If not now, then when?

I feel like Life itself has been teaching me tough lessons for a while... It's a bit of an oxymoron to say that, of course. At the same time, maybe it isn't. I'm always tempted to say 'we learn everyday we get to live' but the truth is... do we?

More often than not I personally ignore the 'lessons' I don't feel ready to learn, and so I'll find myself repeating the same kind of mistake over and over again. Sometimes it's a conscious decision, sometimes it's much more insidious than that.

A particular 'lesson' I'd like to share today is that of 'self-confidence'. I started off as a child full of self-confidence. The whole world was my oyster, so to speak. I was a bubbly, inquisitive little kid always up to no good. And then I started getting bullied at school, and from then on my self-confidence was shattered into billions of pieces.

That shattered confidence stayed with me and I sort of grew into an adult feeling as though half of my own self was missing. More and more, I'd cut myself off people and the world at large. The fear just kept growing, and growing... constantly intensifying no matter how much I tried to rationalise it. I became a doubter of everything, but especially a doubter of my own self. This in turn made me awkward in the presence of others, and then it turned me into a strange breed - some kind of naive pushover who would invariably let the good things pass her by because, well, if I don't believe in myself, if I'm constantly putting my own self down, then why should I act in my own best interest, eh?

A few weeks before Christmas, I met with my music composer friend of mine around a few drinks in some pub. We shared our struggles, our angst, our everything about life, really. And then she said something that struck me. At the time, what she said bothered me to the point where I wished I hadn't met her that day. She'd started talking about her own observations of the world, and it had struck a chord because she was spot on.

She said something along the lines of: "Aliska... Look around you, look at all these people who actually know nothing, but they get to the highest places - they succeed - by acting so confident... and there we are, you and I, actually capable in our own field, and we are going nowhere because we don't act like them. Because we are not confident."

She was right. Everywhere places are filled not by people who know what they're doing, not by the 'best' in their field, but by opportunists who are only good at showing off. Showing off, or being over-confident, has become the main selling point. Forget actual abilities - if you won't show off those abilities, someone else will jump to take your place - and that someone else will be a person that knows how to show off and it will rarely matter that they're actually just bullshitting their way through.

All these thoughts I've just shared now have been dancing in my head since that conversation with my friend, except it's felt more like acid on my brain than anything else... but then Life seemed intent on making me face the issue.

In other words, my friend's observation was just a trigger. I should have seen it coming. It was the 'lesson' coming my way, and this time there was no avoiding it the way I used to when I was younger.

That lesson came through my job, funnily enough. This job so far has forced me to face a lot of my weaknesses, the worst of all being a complete lack of self-confidence. And I know I have to learn the lesson, because it's getting ridiculously repetitive now...

I'm learning, and I can feel the 'missing' part of I coming back. I'm sort of scared of 'her', in a way... because me and her haven't been in touch for a long time... she disappeared when I was 8 and she's coming home now... And she's something else entirely.

So... if not now, then when? It has to be now, otherwise don't bother.