You're so confident!
Maybe she's born with it, maybe it's cocaine.
What are people really thinking when they tell you “you’re so confident!”?
You’re dressed like a slag
You’re dressed like a clown
Seriously, please stop talking
You seem to like yourself an awful lot more than you should when you look like that
Ugh, go away, only people thinner than you deserve to be seen in public
You’re deluded about EVERYTHING
You probably just had a really expensive education
Are you drunk?
Have you taken cocaine?
Wait, are you a TORY?
I have sometimes been told that I’m confident - and sometimes the tone makes it sound like the person is actually saying “you’re very confident… considering.”
But is this just me, well, lacking confidence? Should I just take it at face value that they mean you’re confident and that’s great? Or perhaps even I wish I could be more like you?
They say that true confidence comes from within, but… how? From within… where? Your intestines? Your ear wax? No. They mean your brain so, unless you are in a coma (terrible for my open rate), things going on around you simply MUST have an impact on how you feel about yourself. It’s more a case that some people are better at filtering out life’s natural confidence-crushers and focusing on the positives. I am mostly one of them, in that I don’t dwell too much on the shit stuff.
(Wait, didn’t you start a Substack called Keep It Up Fatty! because some irrelevant twats shouted it at you FOUR YEARS AGO when you were out running? Shhh).
If confidence truly came from within, it would be much harder to get hold of. It might make us worry that if our parents/teachers/peers didn’t instil us with it from a young age, we’d be destined to be unsure of ourselves FOREVER. Instead, we can hack our confidence by trying our best to do stuff that makes us feel good, until we actually feel good.
Like anything, it’s a scale. Nobody, even Hollywood superstars - perhaps especially Hollywood superstars, the fragile little darlings, playing make-believe all day - is always confident, or confident about every facet of their looks and personality, but some people are better at presenting as confident a lot of the time. If confidence is the outward manifestation of self-esteem, there seem to be different ways of showing it.
You can feel shite about yourself and present as confident, but it often makes for a brand of confidence that can feel try-hard: loud, talkative, physically noticeable. And you can be “quietly confident” which seems to be the gold standard for confidence but is actually a bit annoying if you’re not feeling it, as it’s harder to fake. Plus, if you’re so great, why wouldn’t you just show off more? Come on, we all want to see it!
I feel the need to point out here - because god forbid a woman admits to thinking they’re mostly alright, actually - I’ve also been told that I should have more confidence. It’s quite situation dependent.
I write confidently, I can make fairly ballsy decisions and I’m generally socially gregarious, but I also have what coachy types like to call “self-limiting beliefs” when it comes to public speaking and presenting. I don’t mind doing it if I have to, but I always, always feel like I lack gravitas.
Related to this, I’m also pretty rubbish in job interviews and when I tell people this, they say “that can’t possibly be true! You’ve had loads of jobs!”. Sure - but I didn’t get a single one of them from a formal job interview. I have always been personally recommended, or just wheedled my way in through freelance work. In formal job interviews I tend to just mumble “I’m um good at er things and like stuff?” 37 times until I am politely asked to leave. I’m not sure why this is the case but since I’m 43 now I should probably stop blaming it on going to a terrible school. The problem is I’ve now made being shit at job interviews an integral part of my personality which makes it much harder to overcome. I’d better hope those Substack millions come rolling in soon.
Other than the fact that my parents are extremely wonderful, the first thing that ever made me feel confident was realising I was good at writing. From writing came great friendships and great work, both of which increased my confidence further. More shallow things that have helped make me feel more confident over the years include clothes, makeup, male attention, alcohol and social media engagement. I think sometimes we need to lean on and enjoy these kinds of quick fixes while, in the background, we work on the stuff that provides more meaningful, slow release confidence.
These days, I get a lot of confidence from running, and categorically not because I am any good at it. Instead, running has given me the belief, for the first time in my life, that I can actually do something consistently and I will improve. It’s the most dedicated and focused I’ve ever been about anything because, unlike some of my other confidence sources, it doesn’t come at all naturally, and yet still I’ve persevered, which feels like a big achievement. I think this trumps any of the health, fitness or body image benefits as I can apply this belief to other things in my life. I guess this is truly confidence from within. It’s also why it’s so annoying when small men feel the need to reduce running to an arse-shrinking technique. IT’S SO MUCH MORE!
Ever since I typed the word “dedicated” this has been in my head. You’re welcome.
On the flipside, whenever I try more gentle forms of movement, like yoga or Pilates, I feel bad about myself because I am crap at them. I feel like I should do them because they’re good for preventing running injuries but whenever I try them a voice in my head taunts me: “your body is too uncoordinated and cumbersome for this; it’s for the dainty, elegant girls”. Without the sweaty thrills that come fast from more vigorous exercise, I can’t get past it enough to improve.
I used to be best friends with someone who chipped away at my confidence for years, and it took me a long time to realise that was what was happening (so maybe she didn’t either). She would regularly say things like “we can’t wear things like that, we don’t have the legs for them” even though we had entirely different body shapes. In my mid-twenties - ironically while working at heat magazine during peak body image madness - I became a lot more confident, because I was good at my job and had all these new friends and exciting things going on. She couldn’t hide her jealousy and I finally realised how much her own insecurities made her enjoy bringing me down. I ended the friendship (with a somewhat brutal email version of “18 pages FRONT AND BACK!”) and suddenly started wearing dresses all the time because guess what? They suited me after all! Freeing yourself from a toxic relationship - whether friend, lover, family member or boss - can be just the thing for a confidence boost, even if it’s hard at the time.
These days, when it comes to body confidence, I seem to give less of a shit than a lot of my friends, despite many of them having conventionally “better” bodies than I do. But it’s not an “I LOVE MYSELF!” situation; it’s more about liking particular activities more than I dislike my body. I really like bobbing around in the sea, for instance, so I will always jump at the chance to do this, even if it means frolicking around in swimwear in front of my daughter’s teacher (not a stress dream: I actually did this last summer).
It’s not even an age thing - it’s a long time time since I’ve been prohibitively body-conscious in a way that has held me back from doing things I enjoy - but getting older definitely helps with the IDGAF factor. I have never really conformed to traditional beauty standards, but being in my forties obviously makes any notions of finally becoming a Hollyoaks babe beyond laughable. Plus, huge cliché incoming, I think it’s when many of us start to really realise that LIFE IS FOR LIVING!
If you struggle with this stuff, I would try and ask yourself: are you so worried about your stomach that you’re holding yourself back from things you might enjoy? Those things might include: messing around with your kids on a summer’s day, wearing something you love that’s out of your comfort zone, wearing something “unflattering” because it’s more appropriate attire for an activity you want to do (I still have an internal battle about wearing shorts for running when it’s scorchio), enthusiastically shagging someone you fancy (I guarantee they are just grateful to see your tits), braving a fitness class and feeling amazing afterwards, going on holiday by yourself…
And for me, it’s also about how I want to be perceived.
If, like me, you aspire to be FUN! FREE! PHYSICALLY AND MENTALLY STRONG! MAYBE EVEN A BIT SEXY (vom!) and - yes - CONFIDENT!, then ask yourself: is that fun, free, strong, maybe even a bit sexy, confident woman cowering under a Dryrobe or is she cavorting around like she’s in a Tampax advert from 1992? It’s definitely the second one.
If, unlike me, you aspire to be cool, aloof and mysterious (alas, I don’t have the right kind of face for this, so I’ll stick with the dicking around), then the actions you take to be perceived this way will be different: perhaps your kind of confidence involves being someone who is content sitting alone in a restaurant, reading a critically-acclaimed novel and wearing expensive sunglasses that I would lose in five minutes (probably in the sea). And that’s great too.
So, what are people really thinking when they say “you’re so confident”? It’s probably that you’re doing something entirely out of their comfort zone - so, unless that something is actually drugs, perhaps you should let them know that it used to be out of yours too.
A couple of other things I’ve seen recently that got me thinking about confidence:
In
, talked about feeling bad about her nose and I found it really interesting. Most of my friends have noses that could be described as STRONG but I think they are much sexier than my unremarkable snout and I love looking at their beautiful, interesting faces. I also often look at my kids and wonder if their noses will stay kinda regulation like mine, or if their other, more angular genes will make themselves known as they get older. Who nose?- wrote about needing to be pretty in , which is basically what I was banging on about when I said opting out of those sorts of beauty standards as soon as you can makes life a lot easier.
On Friday I went to see the incredible Hollie McNish reading from her new book, Lobster, at Hackney Empire. She has loads of brilliant stuff to say about how girls and women are raised to self-loathe, right down to our - and I nearly couldn’t bring myself to type the word, proving that everything she says about all this is true - vulvas. When I’ve actually finished reading the book I will have some very intelligent, well-rounded views on it but for now, here’s a photo of me enjoying the show with my wonderful pal Lucy who regularly gets the hump about not being mentioned in this newsletter enough.
Incidentally, Lucy has one of those sexy noses I like looking at. AND NOW FOR SOME BORING RUNNING STUFF EXCEPT I DON’T REALLY THINK IT’S BORING BUT YOU PROBABLY DO…
Since my last newsletter, I’ve run the Cambridge Half Marathon and got a PB (a delightfully mediocre one which is what I aspire to: 2.15) AND got a sub-30 at parkrun for the first time since 2021 (and I think only third time ever). Both of these were down to running with/ being paced by running pals - something I would have lacked the confidence to do until recently (THANK YOU ZOE AND TIM, YOU ARE THE BEST!).
It’s now HOLY SHIT LESS THAN FIVE WEEKS until London Marathon. Training was going really well until a couple of days ago when I came down with an annoying cold. I’m trying to remember that I was a bit ahead of schedule, mileage-wise, so going easier this week is NOT an issue, but it’s still a bit stressful. Do you know what would cheer me up and - yup, still on theme - boost my confidence? Getting closer to my meaty sponsorship target!
God I can’t wait until this is over and I can just focus entirely on begging for paid Substack subscriptions instead.
I loved this!
Related to “you’re so confident!” can we also talk about “you work so HARD” said on the gym? 😩