I Try To Believe What I Feel These Days

It makes life much easier for me.
It’s hard to decide what is real these days,
When things look so dizzy to me.

“I’d say that having a lot of confidence probably accomplishes more than having no confidence. I think that was the most redundant sentence ever spoken.” – Jeff

The theme of my life these past two weeks or so has been confidence. Self confidence, really. Let us discuss it now.

Firstly, where does it come from? As I’ve mentioned many times before, I’m no psychologist. This is all speculation based on what little experience I have. But I think it comes from two main sources.

The first is your childhood. Kids brought up in supportive homes should tend to have quite a bit of self-confidence, right? Maybe to some degree. But honestly I don’t think simple support is all it takes. Freedom and positive-outcome trends: that’s what does it. I’ll explain that. I think parents can be as supportive as they want of their kids, but if they don’t let them make mistakes then self-confidence will never grow. If parents do too much for their kids, the kids will remain over-dependent. In that respect, I suppose you could argue that kids with negligent parents, kids that had to learn things themselves and make mistakes along the way should have more confidence than the kids with the doting parents. Balance tends to be the best though. Parents who are supportive of their kid exploring but patient with mistakes. That’s what I mean by freedom. By positive-outcome trends, I mean that confidence will only grow if the kid makes progress in achieving things after making mistakes. If all they do is fail until the parent steps in, their confidence will go down. If it becomes a pattern that they succeed eventually after trying and failing, their confidence will go up.

Also in childhood, we have that lovely thing called “socializing”. School, sports, whatever it is. Kids with low self-esteem for whatever reason get it in their heads that they need to tear down other kids. Which, in turn, lowers their confidence. (In a way it’s amazing that anyone has self-confidence!) One time I saw a news story of a boy who killed himself because the bullying was so bad. The poor boy had nothing wrong with him visually. He was nice-looking and smiley in his picture. It goes to show that kids looking to tear you down will find a way. If they can’t call you ugly, they’ll call you fatty. If they can’t call you fatty, they’ll call you stupid. Poor. Gay. Weak. And so on. (This is a bit off-topic, but not a day goes by that I am not surprised anew that I was not picked on brutally in school. They had so much to work with. I’ll never be able to understand how I escaped this fate and yet some boy in rural Alberta was teased so relentlessly he took his own life.) Incidentally, studies have shown that being bullied in school doesn’t ‘make you stronger’. It has negative effects that last long into adulthood.

So, we have our childhood, a deciding factor. The other thing is our inherent personality types. (Which we can blame roughly half of on our parents, but not all). In short, I think some people are just naturally harder on themselves. They must constantly fight the will to give up, they’re sadder than many when they fail and must work harder to try again.

Unfortunately for me I think I’m one of those people. Also unfortunate is that I’ve found that many people not so afflicted with a lack of confidence can’t really understand what it is like to have so much self-doubt. For example, some people reading this will be surprised at this next sentence and some will relate completely. Faced with a situation where I think one way about something and someone else suggests another, I am not able to go against their opinion and go with mine when acting on a decision. Where some would argue their point, I back down and lose the will to prove mine. The only exception to this is when I’m positive I’m right. But being positive about anything in this life is rare.

This exposes one of my primal weaknesses once more, and I am trying (as you might have learned from some past entries) still to build up some confidence, to gain some fight, to take things on head-on for a change.

The more I think about confidence, the more I realize the power it has. Again, in balance. Everyone knows someone with too much confidence is insufferable, although one has to wonder if some are only compensating in feigned confidence for other perceived shortcomings. But I’m seeing the effect of confidence, low or high, everywhere these days.

This is nerdy, but take Warcraft for instance. Alliance players lose at battlegrounds. They just do. (To ward off the indignant comments, let’s change that to, on my battlegroup Shadowburn, Alliance sucks hardcore.) I have 50 Alterac Valley marks and I’ve only won three. Which means, by those stats, we win roughly one in every forty matches. That’s horrible. The only thing more horrible than that win ratio is how badly people treat each other over the channel. And how they go into the match losing. If someone’s not resigned to a bad outcome, saying something like, “Let’s lose this one fast guys!”, they’re ragging on each other, trying to pass the blame. “You %$#&ing retards don’t know how to play!” or “No wonder Alliance always loses, you %$#&ers are too stupid not to waste time at Tower Point for no reason.” This depresses people of course, and makes them want to lose, if for no other reason than to just finish this match, get out of the game with the guy calling him a worthless player and move on to the next. Then the more we lose, the more we expect to lose, and it’s just a vicious circle.

AV is a bit too big of a scale for me, but Arathi Basin… I’ve started a little experiment. Beginning last Monday, I go into AB and praise every last good work. Every base capped or recapped gets a “Great work!!” from little Nepenthe. Every onslaught warded off gets a /cheer and a pat on the back. Whenever horde is winning, I shoot down the negative talk immediately and, to some degree, spam the channel with optimism. Some people probably think it’s over-enthusiastic, but I’ve noticed something that’s really quite interesting… we’re starting to win. I plan on continuing this experiment because it is my hope to bring about the Shadowburn Arathi Basin revolution. One day, I hope the Shadowburn Horde will totally wilt when they discover that the BG daily is AB. “Crap guys, we never win AB,” they will lament. The revolution is already starting, too. Last night when I was playing, I saw two other people doing the same cheerleading that I do. It was fantastic and wonderful to see.

Anyways, that is my commentary on my confidence. What you can take away from it is this: No matter where you’re coming from, you have the power to give confidence to someone, and you have the power to take it away if only little by little over time. Where confidence is taken away, fear and depression are left in its place. And we know that fear is what stops the world from changing for the better a lot of times.