10/10/2026
Some people seem to move through life with a certain ease, an almost outrageous confidence in their right to be here, to take up space, to want things, to make mistakes, and to try again.
Others spend years negotiating with their own doubts, carefully measuring their words, questioning their instincts, and waiting for permission that nobody ever intended to give them.
I’ve often wondered what makes the difference. Intelligence certainly plays a part, as do temperament, upbringing, and circumstance.
But confidence has a peculiar influence of its own. It changes the way we approach the world, the opportunities we recognize, the people we allow ourselves to love, and even the possibilities we can imagine for our lives.
And confidence is a fascinating creature.
It can be wonderfully unreasonable, occasionally reckless, and quite indifferent to the opinions of people who have appointed themselves guardians of what is sensible and appropriate.
Watch a young child discovering the world. There is such magnificent audacity in the way children approach life.
They climb before considering the consequences, ask questions that embarrass adults, invent entire universes, and expect the world to participate. Their curiosity is gloriously extravagant. They have yet to learn how much of themselves they are supposed to conceal to make other people comfortable.
Then comes the long education in being acceptable.
We learn when to lower our voices, when to disguise our enthusiasm, when to make our ambitions sound modest enough to escape ridicule. We become remarkably skilled at anticipating disapproval.
Eventually, some of these adjustments settle so deeply into our personalities that we begin to mistake them for our natural limitations.
And what a strange bargain we make.
We exchange spontaneity for approval, curiosity for certainty, and sometimes our most interesting qualities for the reassurance of belonging.
Psychologically, confidence develops through experience. Every time we act despite uncertainty, tolerate embarrassment, survive rejection, or discover that a mistake has left us perfectly capable of continuing, we expand our sense of what we can handle.
Courage grows through our encounters with life, particularly those encounters that leave us trembling a little.
I find this rather comforting, and wonderfully liberating. We can be frightened and capable at the same time. We can doubt ourselves and still make an intelligent decision.
We can enter unfamiliar territory with a racing heart and discover that our confidence catches up somewhere along the way.
There is also a deeper question worth asking: How much of what we call our personality is genuinely ours, and how much has been shaped by the expectations we learned to accommodate?
I suspect many of us have spent years becoming exceptionally good at being the person our circumstances required.
We learned to be agreeable, reliable, accommodating, reasonable. These qualities have their place, of course.
But when they become compulsory, they can gradually crowd out our appetite for life.
And that appetite interests me enormously.
The desire to explore, to create, to speak with conviction, to love with an open heart, to change our minds, to begin again at an age when society expects us to have settled into a respectable pattern.
The pleasure of surprising ourselves.
The delicious freedom of occasionally being a little outrageous.
I think confidence becomes especially beautiful when it allows us to live with greater intimacy, both with ourselves and with others. We become more willing to reveal our thoughts, express our desires, acknowledge our vulnerabilities, and allow people to encounter the person behind our carefully cultivated composure.
There is a particular kind of vitality in a person who has stopped apologizing for having a mind of her own.
And I wonder how many of us still carry that wonderfully unruly child within us, the one who once spoke to thunderstorms, believed the moon was following her home, and felt perfectly entitled to ask the universe a thousand impertinent questions.
I would rather grow older in her company than spend the rest of my life being impeccably reasonable.
