My confidence is both high and low, and I don’t understand that.

It’s high when I need to talk myself up,

when I need to try something new,

when I need to be brave,

But when I’m alone, I doubt.

I doubt a lot more than I’d like to admit.

And I really don’t like to admit it.

I’ll admit, the confidence I have is almost entirely fictional.

It’s something I made up, I told myself I had again and again until it became true.

And the most ridiculous realization is that the ideal confidence,

The kind you’re told is important from childhood,

was never even real.

We will our little semblances of confidence into existence.

Real confidence is hard, and it’s somewhat dishonest, but it’s possible.

It’s easier when you have things to be confident about, but you can still do without.

But the ideal of confidence is impossible.

It’s a lie that we enforce as a positive attribute, an unobtainable societal goal.

Confidence seems like such a far off goal,

Many feel like they can’t learn it, like it’d have to be natural.

Sometimes I think that nobody has confidence to begin with,

That picking ourselves apart is the one of the only things that links us all together.

I pick myself apart, strive to be perfect, then tell myself I’m almost there.

It isn’t true, but it brings me comfort.

Thoughts of self improvement ripple throughout my head,

Rolling through my memories, which reinforce that ripple,

Building it ever higher until it bashes into my skull,

Tsunamis like iron walls, shaking me to my core.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll follow these epic plans I make.

No, sleeplessness weakens the muscles I use to lift the weight that is my stress,

So I tug and tug on this weight, and when I finally lift it there’s no time left to go pick up the little tasks strewn about.

Where does the sleeplessness come from?

It comes from the late nights, when the tsunamis’ crashing adds stress to the weight and atrophies the muscles I need to lift it, all the while I distract myself by throwing down scraps of notes on how I can be better, notes I’ll be trying to pick up again tomorrow.