Looking back on that time, I remember feeling confident.
Granted a lot of my confidence came from self-objectification, but it also came from the fact that I understood myself to be funny, smart, likeable, and talented. Most days I felt like a “good person” (whatever that means) with a lot of potential.
I knew some people didn’t like me of course, and sometimes the teenage angst-cocktail of self-consciousness, shame, loneliness, and feeling misunderstood overtook me. But often I liked (and sometimes even loved) myself as a person.
It was weird to watch myself belting out “Hello Dolly” on stage looking so confident, because most of my self-concept was formed in my twenties, and couldn’t have been further away from confidence.
The quick version of the story is that after a traumatizing study-abroad trip at eighteen, I moved to NYC to pursue acting, and realized that everyone was much more talented, smart, and funny than me, and my confidence completely crashed.
The aftermath of my trauma combined with the jarring move from a small rural town to NYC had a huge impact on my personality. I had always been a pretty warm person, but I suddenly found myself being cold, defensive, anxious, angry, shut down, numb, and even outright nasty to people without knowing why.
I felt hijacked by some kind of dark and horrible demon, and it called into question my entire sense of self. I figured if this nasty, cold, numb version of me is me, then I must have just been lying to myself (and everyone else) before.
I didn’t know what other conclusion to draw than that my previously kind and positive self-assessment had been completely wrong. This fact was in and of itself embarrassing and shameful, because it meant that instead of being “confident” in high school I had been “delusional,” “vain,” and “narcissistic.”
Ugh. Nothing is worse than a woman who likes herself too much; nothing more humiliating than an overly confident woman.
I was mortified, and the shame just made my anxiety, anger, numbness, defensiveness, and nastiness worse. It rolled into crippling social anxiety, imposter syndrome, constant feelings of insecurity, and self-sabotaging behaviors. It rolled into devastating body hatred, a feeling that nothing mattered, and the existential crisis of deep depression.
The weird thing is that even while I felt completely worthless, I still also felt a kind of haughty superiority. I simultaneously hated myself, and also looked around and felt empirically better than everyone else.
