Growing up, I was a pretty confident kid. But this confidence didn’t come out of nowhere. It started with the classic tale of other kids teasing me at school, whether it be about my hair (I had a pixie cut at one point), or my weight, the way I spoke broken Arabic/Malay, or how I was mixed race. Nothing I did seemed to be right in the eyes of other people.
Remember that scene from The Help, when Aibileen would always say to the little girl Mae, “you is kind, you is smart, you is important”?
Well, that’s what my mom did for me. My mom used to always say that other people’s opinion didn’t matter, and would always remind me that I was beautiful, I was smart, and I was exotic.
I sincerely believe that it was through her encouragement that I was able to develop this sense of confidence within myself. To believe that I am whatever I wanted to be despite what everyone else thought of me.
I’m not going to lie, this sense of confidence (maybe too much of it at some points) has brought me far in life. While I’m not the smartest tool in the box, I did know how to work people, and it didn’t hurt that I was confident in whatever I pursued even though most of the time I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I was a huge advocate of the ‘fake it till you make it’ mantra, and that was the truth for me because a lot of the things that I am known for today started from me not knowing the hell what I was doing during the beginning of it. Because of it I have managed to land jobs I could never imagine, get paid in amounts that are sort of ridiculous for my age, and even date the hottest men that I could only dream off.
I ran with ‘faking’ my way through life proudly for a long time, and it always brought me success time and time again. But if there was something I couldn’t manage to ‘fake’ was with myself for some reason. I was confident (overly confidently at times) with my abilities with other people, but when it came down to myself I always felt like a phoney.
You see, I didn’t care what others thought of me, but there was still that one opinion that would always point out the negative parts of myself, and that opinion belonged to me. I thought to myself, “while you may have fooled others with how far you’ve come, don’t forget that you’re still that fat kid who can barely speak Arabic or Malay properly and that you’ll always be less prettier or smarter than your siblings or friends.”
To compensate these thoughts, I always sought for contentment through the validation I received from work because I knew that I was good at whatever I was doing anyway. But I always fell in the same pattern.
I get the job, I execute it, I fall into stagnation, and I resign.
And it was always the same process, over, and over, and over again.
I worked with startups to fortune 100 companies, but nothing seemed to sit right with me. After almost seven years of doing the same shit year in and year out, I finally fell into a rut last year after resigning from what I thought would be my dream job. I thought, “What else do you want? How was this not enough yet?”
After trying to coax myself out of my own misery through denial and some self-praise, I decided, “okay let’s focus on my own thing for reals now.” So, I tried doing that for a while, but every time it came down to producing something for myself, the thoughts of being a fake would always resurface. I felt like while I could sell the “lie” to other people, I would always know the real truth about myself – that I was just some con artist who managed to weasel their way to the top, and that the truth was that I am just this useless loser who will never find happiness so I should just stop trying because I am nothing…
There’s this quote from the show Sense8 (btw if you’ve not watched it, you should), that resonated with me profoundly when I first heard it. “The voice in your head that tells you to cut your wrists, or do anything else to end your life, it never shouts. It only whispers.”
These negative thoughts I had about myself, these whispers that never went away even after all the validation I received, they were so powerful that they still managed to heavily distort the truth despite my achievements.
So the question remained, why did I do all of this to myself?
You see, I hate failing (and I’m pretty sure many of you as well). But my fear of failing gets too much at times that it stops me from pursuing anything. To cope with this, I think that’s why I adopted the whole ‘fake it till you make it’ mantra early on in life, by somehow detaching myself during the faking process aka trial/error (failure) period until I actually succeed at the task at hand, I would then resume back to living in present moment when I was finally ‘successful’.
When I think about it now, one of the biggest reasons why I was overwhelmingly scared of failing was because I was ultimately scared of letting down the only person that mattered to me, myself. Because if I couldn’t see myself as this ‘great’ person anymore (granted it was laced heavily with feelings of phoniness), then who else will since nobody else gives two shits about me anyway?
Writing all of this down now seems to have really simplified my issue at hand, but it took me months of just forcing myself to deal with it and understand the things I did over these years. I realised that in order for me to move on from this unhealthy way of living, I needed to force myself to become present with my own thoughts and feelings.
One of the biggest mistake I realised that was happening was that I always lumped up so many of my thoughts and ideas together that it would be too much for me, or let alone even for anyone else to sort through it in order to execute the tasks at hand accordingly.
So, I started out small at the beginning, I paced myself. Every time I went somewhere, I told myself “okay, this trip you’re going to take photos on the DSLR apart from your phone”, and although it was a bit of a struggle at first but in the end I got a hang of it. And I continued applying that same technique over the course of the next few trips I went on by slowly adding one more task into the mix till I was comfortable to photograph and film without stressing myself out too much.
Of course, that’s just one facet of my life that I have been trying to apply this ‘pace yourself’ mantra. Other areas include, not throwing myself into relationships every time a guy shows interest, not applying for a job every time I feel like shit about myself and need a ‘quickie’ for validation from others, and many other areas.
I realised that there was no use in placing such unrealistic expectations on myself because I knew that ultimately it was just a set up for failure. I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from pacing myself was that I should be kind, understanding, loving and thoughtful with myself just as how I would be with other people. As RuPaul would say, “if you can’t love yourself then how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?”
I’m not going to lie, I still struggle with these negative thoughts and emotions from time to time, and yeah I do worry about what my future holds for me and whether I will be able to achieve some form of success especially since I was always that bitch who tried to plan everything in her life in advance. But of course, over time I have come to realisation that no matter how much you try to plot out your life’s journey, the universe will always have other plans for you instead.
While I’m not sure how many people will read this post, I do hope that my story can help you in some ways or another.
To myself, and to whoever reading this, always remember that, “you is kind, you is smart, you is important.” 🖤
