Who is the most confident person you know?

I think as you age, you realize that there is only one type of confident person. It’s the kind of person who thinks they know everything. The person that has a suggestion for everything, even when it’s blatantly wrong. It’s the person who can’t learn, because they think their ideas are already pretty great and need no correction or instruction.

Everyone else becomes confident in their subject matter area, and leaves the rest to other people who also know what they’re talking about. I tend to “jewel the elephant” in stories to make them flow, but it is a low-level “Southernization,” not a retelling. Everything I have said is true, but there has to be a tiny bit of poetic license so that a sentence actually flows. I could say, “she walked from here to there,” but it’s not getting to the heart of the matter even though it’s factual. In fact, I think I do less smoothing than I do cutting out the filler. You don’t need to see me driving for fifteen minutes, you want the conversations I had in both locations, for example.

There is a complete difference between telling a story to someone and having a conversation. In a conversation, you are expecting someone to talk back. In a blog entry, it is all self-contained. I have left out bits, but not because I’m trying to make someone else feel bad. It’s that their choice as to what to leave in is different than mine…. and they’re free to tell their own story, even in the comments so that it’s immediately visible to those who just read mine. People don’t, but they could and it would make my blog a thousand times more interesting.

There’s also a difference in my confidence when I’m writing and my confidence when I’m out here in the world. I am master of my own domain, literally. It’s like 20 bucks a year for theantileslie.com. But, when I leave this space, I am no longer in charge of anything. I do not treat the whole world as if it is mine, just this tiny little piece of it. I have to be the most confident person I know on this web site, because there aren’t any other narrators of my own story.

In my actual life, Supergrover, Bryn, and Zac (as well as my family) are also narrators, and I am responsible for listening to them as much as talking and letting them know how I feel. They don’t get the “God” version of me because I am not narrating my story in their faces, I am asking for their input. It’s just that Supergrover sees less of the conversational side with me because she hasn’t had a conversation with me in eight years. We used to chat where we were both in front of the computer, both paying attention to each other, so it was harder to get off track than always being async.

Not having conversations made me a narrator in my e-mails, when she was looking for conversation that wasn’t there because it wasn’t. The tautology is real. I cannot think of it as a conversation if you aren’t there. I will always think of it as a letter you’ll pick up in your future, whenever that may be.

I am very good at watching other people go confidently in the wrong direction because it’s not my place to say anything. It’s also my place to stand there and take it when I do tell people flat out “I think you’re doing something wrong.” That’s because it’s not my place to say something and I deserve it, but I also bear the responsibility as a good friend to stand there and take it because that person needs to chew on something. At the very least, they need to think about it and say “I’m going to do what I’m going to do, get used to it” or “you’re right. I didn’t think of that.” Then, it’s my job to sit on that answer, and to love people even when their answer is the worst possible outcome.

I’m not judgmental. I will still love you through whatever you’re going through, even when you’re a hot mess. That’s because I know there’s a difference between surviving and thriving. Survival mode doesn’t give you any higher function. You have to save yourself.

Some people do this by hurting others. Some people do this by hurting themselves. Some people do this by hurting others and not realizing how much watching that is going to hurt them.

For instance, I’ve never once been as angry at Supergrover as I have been at myself. I hurt her and I watched the fallout, because the hurt was unintentional and I felt sincerely helpless to “fix us.” I would if I could, but I can’t, and I have shown myself that for many years. She hasn’t held that wrong over my head so much as praising me for being an amazing writer and then holding my blog over my head. But even that could be redirection from what she’s actually mad at, and I won’t know until she tells me.

I am satisfied with not knowing, because I know how our relationship goes when she doesn’t want to talk about something. It becomes inauthentic, a shadow of itself, and it hurts me. I am sure it hurts her, too, but I cannot speak to that. I feel like we lanced a huge boil the other day, which has led me to believe that I’m going to be okay whether she is or not about our situation. The only clarity on her questions comes from me, and if she’s not interested enough to work on them, I’m confident enough to believe that there are other people out there who do want an authentic relationship.

She knew I was always going to be a blogger, because she was a fan first…. one that fed my ego and made me feel amazing about myself. Now, it’s the bane of her existence. I’m done, because I manage to piss her off and move her, but the only things worth mentioning are the things that piss her off and not what keeps her coming back. It makes me look mean and vindictive, when if I wrote that someone was an asshole to me that day, they probably were. That’s because if someone is glorious, I’ll write that, too, and my writing changes as fast as we do.

My dad has this kind of confidence, but I had to learn it from other women. He planted the ideas, but they made them blossom. That’s because women aren’t really taught to be confident in this society. We are taught that men are more capable than we are, why it was so devastating for my mother to find out I was queer. For her, that came across as me losing EVERYTHING. She couldn’t even have her own credit cards until three years before I was born. Of course that’s going to skew her vision of my future. And that’s before we start talking about AuDHD and physically disabled.

I’ve always been attracted to Type A people (mostly women) because they’re confident, and I’m trying to learn how to do that. And attraction covers an entire spectrum, because a lot of my partners have been Type A, as well as my friends. It’s not something I’m reacting to in trying to please/enable them. It’s trying to figure out how they work so I can get it together, too. It’s never happened, but there’s always hope.

I love what makes my people feel confident.

For Supergrover, I believe it’s her dogs and her books. She gets lost in both, taking her to a different world with its own language, an alpha dog who commands her pack while also inhaling an enormous amount of fiction.

For Bryn, it’s definitely animals. She can run a room of primates (including humans) as easily as she can have full conversations IN ENGLISH with her own dog, because her dog probably has the largest vocabulary I’ve ever seen in a canine outside of fiction. I’ve tried using how Bryn talks to Pippi with Oliver, who is a dog, and it works.

Zac, Oliver can understand English in full sentences, don’t let anyone tell you differently. 😛 I love saying to Oliver, “pick up your toy and lay down over here.” Yes, he can handle sentences with conjunctions. I wouldn’t have thought of that if Bryn hadn’t done it first.

For Zac, I think Oliver keeps him grounded. Oliver will tell him the truth when no one else will, and that truth is that he is beautiful and beloved and everything he needs all within himself. There is nothing that Zac could do that would make Oliver stop loving him, and he knows it. I hope he takes Oliver’s belief in him and uses it on himself, because Zac is indeed magic. I just don’t think he knows it. He displays confidence about so many things, because he’s intelligent and works in intelligence. Therefore, he knows more about the world than most people because he sees a bigger chessboard and is smart enough to analyze it. Being smart enough to analyze it breaks your heart.

It breaks mine and I don’t know a tenth of what he does, because I only read news articles and he’s been in the field since he was 18. He feels confident that he’s risen to the level where he wants to be, because he’s very good at his job and it allows him the time to think about other things. It also gives him enough time to be a writer, because he’s not stuck on a steep learning curve at work. He gets confidence in all areas of his life because his work is stable and reliably outstanding.

So, overall, if I had to pick the most confident person I know, it would be tied three ways. The people I know who are the most confident are the people I chose to do life with. I wouldn’t have it any other way, because we all have our own subject matter areas.