Advice

On doing it now

I don’t feel worthy of the kind of person I want to date. I’m working on my body, my career, my life, but feel like I can’t start looking for a partner until I’m in some perfect spot in the future that might never come. This also bleeds into friendships where I crave closeness but also can’t let myself drop my guard enough to build that intimacy.

How would you advise someone works on this? Apart from therapy. I’m looking into that as soon as my insurance kicks in.

 

I wish confidence was a bodily fluid. I wish I could spend my nights catching average white men in nets baited with vinyl records and vape pens and then milk their excess confidence like snake venom. That’s all you need, really, a healthy dose of the undeserved confidence of an average white man. (And by average I don’t mean typical. I mean mediocre. Those uninspired fuckers are brimming with the stuff.) I wish I could bottle up that warm, slippery goo and then sell it to people like you on the black market. I’d be rich and you’d be happy and the world would be a better place.

In lieu of this service, all I can do is attempt to inspire you to build your own confidence through mental and emotional exercise like some personal trainer of the soul. That’s a bit of a trick for me, because it’s difficult to inspire someone like you without dragging out a sackful of stale-ass Tony Robbins style self-help clichés about tuning into the present moment and not letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.

I mean, shit. I hope your insurance kicks in and all, but you don’t need a therapist to tell you that the future doesn’t exist. It never has and it never will, especially the one in your head where you’ve accumulated enough external indicators of value to finally warrant being loved by someone.

This moment right here and right now is all you’ve got. It’s fine to work on your body, your career, and your life, but not for the sake of some far off imagined future. The work you do has to give you sustenance now. Start getting messy today. Let your fucking guard down already. Take a risk. It doesn’t have to come from a place of confidence. It can come from a place of howling terror, as long as it comes. As long as you come. Now. Do it.

Now.

I don’t have a syringe full of undeserved white man confidence, but I am high enough at the moment to instead give you literally just one word of advice:

Now.

One more time for the cheap seats:

Now.

Standard

23 thoughts on “On doing it now

  1. Christina says:

    Holy fuck, LW, it’s like you wrote exactly what I’ve been thinking and struggling with for the past…two years?! And holy fuck, CQ, you delivered exactly what I needed to hear right when I needed to hear it. Thank you both for unknowingly giving me that nudge to keep going.

  2. Lyma says:

    That advice is so stupid and anti-racial and sexist. There’s nothing special about white men and everybody knows that. What you wrote is actually offending. It feels like that answer doesn’t come from the real Coquette that i know.

  3. Bell says:

    Wow. I asked this a while back. Thank you for responding.

    I made the excuse that I was just taking some time to “figure myself out” but months became years of just “well, I like being alone better” when really it was “I am terrified of rejection to the point that being alone is and kind of sad is better than being freshly hurt.”
    But I’m tired of being just barely ok. Honestly, ” inspire you to build your own confidence through mental and emotional exercise like some personal trainer of the soul. ” struck me. I never considered just, treating it like a workout plan to build confidence. Time to get some mental abs.

    • Alicia says:

      “I made the excuse that I was just taking some time to “figure myself out” but months became years of just “well, I like being alone better” when really it was “I am terrified of rejection to the point that being alone is and kind of sad is better than being freshly hurt.”
      But I’m tired of being just barely ok.”

      Holy fuck. This is me. I mean, I knew it deep down, but I hadn’t really admitted it to myself, not in those exact words. Reading this was like having my heart stomped on while looking straight into a mirror. I cried. I needed to face it. Thank you, random internet stranger, for writing it.

  4. Boobs says:

    I know she’s right, but Idon’t even understand this. Every time I try to behave confidently, I just feel this ugly twist in the pit of my stomach and feel so disgusted and embarrassed by myself. I wish I didn’t feel so lethargic and all this stagnation and disillusion…I annoy myself.

    • Tatty says:

      It might be difficult to do, but you can be confident. Alter your physicality for a start. Instead of slouching, keep your back straight, roll your shoulders back and look forward, not down. It tricks your mind. Making eye contact with someone say when you’re out walking and a ‘good morning’, helps too if you struggle with eye contact due to low confidence. A lot of confidence I’ve found has to do with what you wear, too. If you like it, you feel confident. If it highlights the parts of yourself you like, you feel confident. And if it worked for Elizabeth Taylor, it’s good enough for me. She recommended looking in a mirror from several angles and assessing the parts of your physique that you like the most, and the bits that you’re not so keen on. Emphasise with the way you dress the parts of your physique that you like the most. Say a slim fit blouse/shirt if you’re someone who works out or a high waisted pair of trousers, they make everyone’s butt look great, thanks to the waist-hugging and lengthening they do by the way they’re cut slightly longer than hipster-style trousers, for example. Dresses cut on the bias are flattering for a variety of figures, and over the years I’ve been a variety!

      On a separate note I’m not sure confidence has anything to do with ‘stealing’ it from average white men or even average white women who have been conditioned to believe they’re entitled to be confident, usually from a very early age, because I would assume that we’re all going through our own issues and dealing with them the best way we’ve been culturally conditioned to. Minimising someone else’s confidence, or allowing resentments to fester and take control over our minds with our envious perceived notion of their confidence doesn’t make us more confident. We can cultivate confidence in myriad ways whether that be using better posture, liking ourselves a little more when we wear something we really look great in, exercising to release some endorphins and getting outdoors more and appreciating the things we don’t take time to notice, the sunsets for instance, or challenging ourselves to speak to a stranger, even if it’s only a cursory greeting can all help us feel more confident. I hope some of what I’ve written can be of some use to you and you can begin to feel less disgusted and embarrassed of your desire to be confident, Boobs. I really do.

        • Tatty says:

          That, or I’m writing from the perspective of a confident white person who wouldn’t be as confident were it not for the experiences afforded to me by the circumstances and place of my birth and the subsequent education I received where the majority of my peers throughout my schooling were white, too. It’s not a coincidence that the majority of students I then encountered through further and higher education were also white and, in many cases, from privileged backgrounds and now the fields they work in, doctors, lawyers, politicians are populated primarily with individuals from a specific socio-economic segment of British society. Very few of my colleagues had “unique sounding” names which acted as another hurdle in attaining a successful career, unless you count Tarquin and India as unique sounding names which, as I write with the experience of being from a poorer background than many of my colleagues, at the time, I did. However with older familial individuals around me who provided me with books, trips abroad, assistance with applying for scholarships from childhood to be able to attend better schools than the UK’s comprehensive education system and through attending those schools, participating in extra-curricular activities which further enhanced my confidence and allowed me to believe I was as entitled as others in my schooling and subsequent employment to be confident in my abilities. So please, don’t tell me that I’m delusional to believe that white people aren’t conditioned to be confident. We are, through the opportunities afforded to us by our birth, for instance, I’ve never been stopped on the street once to be searched by police, yet, someone of another ethnicity who lives in the same borough as I do was stopped 4 times within an afternoon. We’re conditioned to be confident because we don’t have to worry about being caught with possession of an illegal substance because the drug raids aren’t happening in places like Muswell Hill they’re happening in other parts of the same borough, we’re conditioned to be confident because if you’re slim and with eurocentric features you’re often told you’re beautiful from a very young age which instills confidence and by the fact that society currently for all it’s corporate window-dressing, still offers unpaid internships which only those with access to funding or familial financial resources can afford to take.

      • Boobs says:

        Thank you, Tatty! I agree, I think dressing better and exercising all help. I appreciate your response.

        Also, Coquette isn’t being literal, and her point is that confidence *can’t* be stolen. There’s no special ingredient that’s magically going to imbue your life with it. All you really have to do is just be confident. Just go do whatever it is you want to do and live your life. She’s also right that mediocre white men possess way more confidence than they deserve. (I am familiar with that type of men. We all are.)

  5. Huh says:

    True unshakable confidence is bred from encountering a wide-range of experiences throughout life. You’ll grow wise in the process. Having discipline to conquer life’s challenges and achieve personal goals. Failing a thousand times willingly; believing that you’ll “succeed” eventually, in some capacity, with enough practice.

    If you don’t purposely place yourself in situations that your ‘anxious mind’ deems uncomfortable, or foreign, or even scary, then you are missing out on becoming a hell of a lot stronger, and more confident.

    If you don’t view fucked up circumstances and unsettling encounters ultimately as positives that you survived then you’re viewing it wrong. Take the good from the bad. Evolve.

    Personally I’ve sought out new states of mind, challenges, activities, scenarios, etc., that make me nervous, or anxious, or fearful. Some of them are extremely silly and nonsensical. Building yourself is all mental gymnastics. It confuses me that this isn’t obvious to way more people…

    And also diet and exercise are ESSENTIAL. It’s so fucking obvious it hurts and yet emotionally unstable human catastrophes walk around carrying a Burger King bags, drinking sodas, and not exercising… gtfo

    And one obvious reason a lot of “average” white dudes are probably as confident as they are is because of playing sports growing up. Pressures on. You have to believe in yourself or you’ll look like a fool in front of a large number of people.

    • dad says:

      True unshakable confidence can also be bred from encountering a wide-range of experiences throughout life. You’ll grow wise in the process. Having discipline to conquer life’s challenges and achieve personal goals. Failing a thousand times willingly; believing that you’ll “succeed” eventually, in some capacity, with enough practice.

      If you don’t purposely place yourself in situations that your ‘anxious mind’ deems uncomfortable, or foreign, or even scary, then you are missing out on becoming a hell of a lot stronger, and more confident.

      Try to view fucked up circumstances and unsettling encounters ultimately as positives that you survived.

      Seek out new states of mind, challenges, activities, scenarios, etc., that make you nervous, or anxious, or fearful. Some of them are extremely silly and nonsensical.

      And also diet and exercise are ESSENTIAL.

      And one obvious reason a lot of “average” white dudes are probably as confident as they are is because of playing sports growing up. Pressures on. You have to believe in yourself or you’ll look like a fool in front of a large number of people.
      .
      .
      there I took out the “I’m better than you” bits so that readers don’t get turned off before reading the good parts that I agree with

      • Huh says:

        Thank you.

        I realize I’m judgemental. Because there’s information everywhere about the importance of diet and exercise. I just wish more people took it serious and benefited. Especially certain family members…

        • Chris says:

          My wife and I have started incorporating vegetables into our breakfast, and it’s a big help. For example, a small amount of sprouts with eggs. Sometimes she’ll take a zip-lock of kale to have while she drives to work. Because of the Sulforaphane, kale and broccoli sprouts are very good for anyone who is dealing with post-injury joint pain or chronic conditions, which we both have but manage well with foods like these.

          If you have any health tips, I’d be happy to know about them. This simple change that I learned from hearing Dr. Rhonda Patrick was a huge help.

      • KittyNinja says:

        Thanks, Dad. No one wants to take advice from someone who believes that you’re too ignorant to do better for yourself.

        There is wisdom in respecting the learner is doing the best they can. If it were that simple, if life were that simple, you wouldn’t have people killing themselves over something “so stupid.”

  6. Chris says:

    I have to say, catching guys in nets, “milking” them, and feeding the milk to somebody else sounds like it would make an excellent whacked-out porn plot.

Leave a Reply to flblbl Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *