the pressing of female lips to mine in any romantic capacity was a foreign concept and I was intrigued. Doubly so by the fact that the hottest, most popular girls were in attendance. If a situation could be made of boners, it would be this one. We all formed a giant circle—maybe twenty or twenty-five of us—as the ceremonial bottle dropped in the middle. In a flash of reflected light, it was in motion as it created a tiny glass orb of possibilities. And it landed . . . on Michelle Carter. You know, MICHELLE CARTER. The insanely HOTTEST girl in our class. Only the girl I had lusted over since fifth grade. I wanted her in a bad way, though I wasn’t sure exactly for what. Had she one day suddenly turned and yelled, “Jam it in!” at me, I’m not convinced I’d have known what to do. (I have a much better grasp on this now, however . . . Sex is that thing where you’re naked except for your socks and there’s a lot of apologizing, right?) The bottle was spun again. As an altar boy, I prayed to Jesus’s father to let the pointy end land on me so I could put my mouth on this girl’s face. Clearly, he only half heard me because it did indeed find itself pointing at my shocked and panting face, but Michelle’s response was unanticipated. Just as I was in mid-kiss-lip, she pointed at me and shouted, “I’m not kissing HIM,” as if the results had included jail time or diarrhea. I was used to public ridicule (once an inventive kid told everyone I fingered his cat. “How long could that follow you through grade school?” you ask. How long could kids follow you around while wiggling their pinkies going, “Here kitty kitty”? Turns out, three years. Kinda funny now that I think about it, though . . .) but this one stung extra hard. Needlesstoblab, it shattered my confidence for quite a while. Like, until college. PLEASE don’t say “awwwww” or feel bad. I’m not trying to tell a schmaltzy sob story to elicit sympathy. I’m fine with it. All of that torment made me the person I am, and things are going well these days. I’ll cry about it on my bed of cash. At the time, however, any positive emotions I had about myself were cut to ribbons in a tweeny shredder.
Ah, self-confidence. You fickle, fickle slut, you. Sometimes you’re there, other times you’re with some other jerk, nowhere to be found. The idea of self-confidence is irritating the way it’s usually presented, like it’s some tangible “thing” you can just throw onto your brain like a jacket. Nerds struggle with this one quite a bit, and all those times when I was younger and felt the pull of social anxiety, it never helped for someone to just say at me, “Have confidence in yourself!” “Is my having confidence in myself helpful toward you fucking off in the foreseeable future?” I would think in my head. What I would say was something like, “Oh, yeah! I’m fine! Why, I’m the mutton’s buttons!” because I’m not superconfrontational that way.
Lately I’ve been traveling an ungodly amount, and when I’m unable to affix myself to the Webs, I just drift off into random thought. Sometimes I think about things I have to do, other times I’ll relive frustrating situations and get re-pissed about them, and still other times I create fractious, hypothetical situations out of thin air wherein I mentally argue with made up people in public settings. Recently, however, I somehow fell into a constructive-thought river and started contemplating the concept of confidence. What is it REALLY? How do people get it? Why do some people crumble so easily while others persevere and succeed? Nothing original there, but I had an uncanny feeling that maybe there was more to it than what’s on the surface.
Then, while desperately trying to find a cab in another city, it hit me. Confidence in any scenario isn’t about trying to convince yourself, “Hey! I’m awesome squared!” It’s about feeling like you have options. Whenever you have at least one other option in life, you feel relaxed, safe, and cool because if the one thing doesn’t work out, you’re not going to die. Literally. It’s all that limbic system/survival mechanism shit. The brain