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Growing Into Confidence

Gerald Washington
3 min readNov 22, 2020
Photo by Luemen Carlson on Unsplash

Reading a lot of confidence articles, are you? I feel where you’re coming from. I really do. For years, I used to do the same thing. I used to read endless articles about confidence and what you need to get it. After reading an enlightening article, I would feel okay for an hour and then be right back to my low confidence happy self.

I would look at friends who seemed confident in their skin and ask myself- how are they so confident in themselves? What’s their secret? Meanwhile, why was confidence for me like finding gold? Yes, I tried to fake confidence. That would work for ten minutes. Eventually, I couldn’t keep up the act any longer. Enough of this! I need my low confidence again.

Certain friends would fade away from my life. It hurt that I couldn’t keep up with their sky-high confidence. They were conquering the world in different ways. Meanwhile, I was just trying to get the basics down in my 20s — while fighting to gain my confidence. Stuff, like get an apartment, get a car, and make decent money, were my goals.

My confidence would slowly improve through my mid-20. Still, it didn’t feel like I had ‘’it’’. Something was missing inside of me. It was frustrating going through unpleasant experiences that can torpedo a person’s confidence, but, it must be done to grow as human beings.

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Gerald Washington
Gerald Washington

Written by Gerald Washington

Just a curious writer/blogger trying to navigate a complex world. Sharing my words helps a lot with that.

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