What is the greatest gift someone could give you?
A lot of people have answered ‘time’ for this question. That’s a really good answer. So are some of the other ones I read. Faith, love…all wonderful things. For me, I think confidence is the greatest gift I could receive. Not just the confidence that allows me to know that I’m doing my job well, or the confidence in my ability to make awesome things out of yarn, I want true confidence in myself. I want to be so comfortable with who I am that I can speak to other people in public that I don’t know simply because they’re wearing an awesome shirt. I want to be so confident that I can tell that little boy who walked into Walmart with his dad that his granny square scarf is way cool.
Maybe I’m confusing confidence with extrovertedness, but I feel like they go hand in hand. I know people who can and do make friends with random people at the most mundane places. My dad, for everything that I hate about him, he is one of those people. I have seen him in action. It seems to come so naturally to him. I was with him in the waiting area of a Jiffy Lube several years ago and he got the most insane deal on the repair for his car because he just started chatting up one of the guys who worked there. The way I am would have me sitting there quietly and then balking at the price for my car repair.
I don’t know, maybe it’s confidence in my ability to socialize that I specifically need. Small talk makes me uncomfortable because it feels so awkward. I don’t do awkward well. I don’t know how to turn it around.
I have discovered though, that as I am getting farther and farther away from the job that saw my mentor doing her best to keep me in my place, which in her mind was a place beneath her and as low to the ground as possible, I am starting to rise up again. I don’t think I have ever been truly as grown as I could be. My entire life has been spent around narcissistic people that have prevented me from being my authentic self. It’s almost cliche to use that term “authentic self”, but it’s true. I got away from one narcissistic person—my father, only to turn around and spend 19 years working for my old boss who treated me the same way he did. As my therapist has told me recently, I have never had time to heal. Now that I am finally free of those people, I can work on being that confident person I’ve always wanted to be. Maybe after enough time, I won’t need someone to gift it to me because I’ll have given it to myself.
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