Don’t Worry, Be Confident!

Today’s NaBloPoMo prompt asks a deceptively difficult question: If you could permanently get rid of one worry, what would it be?

It’s a tricky question because it’s so easy to come up with answers.

So many possible answers immediately flood my mind, so the hard part is picking only one. Especially because I tend to worry about and second-guess everything. Like, everything.

Money, for example, is an obvious answer. It would be great not to have to worry about where our money is coming from, and being able to afford all the things we have and want to keep, or want to get. I’d love to not feel stress about getting and keeping jobs and making money.

I would love to never have to worry about my health, or the health of my family and loved ones, including my cats, one of whom is about 17 years old. I don’t just mean having health insurance (thank goodness for Covered California). I mean it would be great to be able to say, “I’ll never get sick; my family will never get sick, nothing bad will ever happen to them, they’ll never die. I’m not going to worry about it.” We’re not necessarily talking realism here, so why not consider that.

I’d love to be able to do, or say, or write, anything that I want to without worrying about the consequences. I’d love to be brave without being afraid of screwing up, or of offending other people or making them angry at me, or of them saying mean, harmful things about me. I’d love to feel like I have all the knowledge I could ever possibly need to respond to and confront any possible critics, and actually participate in a debate that, just perhaps, I could win. Or at least feel like I made some good points and got the other person thinking about why they’re wrong.

So there are lots of options here. It’s hard to make a decision.

I often have trouble making decisions, generally, because I need to weigh out the pros and cons of all my choices. I’m terrified of making a mistake. I want perfection, even though I know there’s no such thing. Frankly, I lack the confidence to really commit to my choice and pick one. As a result, I often choose more than one thing because I don’t want to limit myself to only one, or I get so wracked with trying to make a decision that I end up not choosing anything.

Fortunately, perhaps, I’ve noticed this indecision runs in my family. It’s fortunate simply because I’m glad it’s not just me, and I can sometimes see when family members have it worse than I do. My brother, for example, is stellar about second-guessing the decision we’ve all made as a group, and then he drags us through the whole decision-making process again. I think he just wants to be in control.

It would be great to stop worrying about what will happen if I make the wrong decision, and whether or not I’ll royally mess something up. I would love that. I’d love to not second-guess everything. I’d love to have the total, absolute confidence to not even consider the possibility that I would screw this up, and if I do, so what? I’ll survive. Making a decision is ultimately better than not making one, even if it ends up being wrong. At least I did something.

So I guess if I could permanently get rid of one worry, it would be the worry that I’m going to make a mistake. The opposite of that would be having the confidence to believe in my choices, my actions, my decisions, my skills, my abilities, my thought processes, my talent, without second guessing or feeling worried that I am (or will be) making a mistake. I would love this, because I’m convinced that all the other problems (money, jobs, even health to a degree) will then take care of themselves. They would not actually be problems, if I have the strength to face them all honestly and in a way that is true to my real, confident self.

5 thoughts on “Don’t Worry, Be Confident!

  1. This entry is a really good start!

    • Thanks. It feels like it! 🙂

  2. I love this post and it says a lot about you. It also tells me that you are much more “enlightened” than you realise. Of course, we shall see if I have just created a beast in saying so! 🙂

    But in all seriousness, this is by and far your most honest post. What is harder than to look at one’s own foibles to select the one worry we could part with. Yours would be fear of making a mistake. And yes, it is something that shows up in our family: your mom comes to mind fastest. I’m very much the product of my mother, as much as I try to break the mold. In my way, I am the diametric opposite of you, and likely this is both a good thing and a huge flaw, as it made me the one to determine a lot of the things we did, when I know you might have been happier doing other things. But I always got impatient with your dithering.

    Are you wondering how this might be a flaw? Easily. I barrel right into everything, lead almost completely by emotional state, and make a staggering amount of mistakes approaching any situation that way! You think things through too much, I don’t think them through enough. The only positive to result from this is how much I have had to learn things the hard way. So each side has its advantages and disadvantages. There is nothing wrong with occasionally throwing caution to the wind and just do something, nor is it the worst thing to consider every angle before jumping in. It is the happy medium that is hard to find. For all of us.

    As for Hank, well, drop the words “I think” and you have it exactly! Ha, ha, ha!

  3. […] items. Yes, I still want to publish something I can be proud of, but I tend to second-guess and worry about everything, and I often want to get someone’s (usually Alex’s) opinion or approval first. With a daily […]

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