My Elusive, Fickle Friend

Confidence is to dating, what fire is to camping. Without a nice roaring campfire, you're just eating shitty food outdoors and sleeping on the ground. But with too much fire, you're cutting your vacation short because a wildfire is raging out of control. When you're dating, you must have *some* confidence, but not in excessive amounts. After all, if you can't sell yourself *to* yourself, how are you going to sell yourself to a near stranger you met online and are now meeting for the first time? Can there possibly be a more unreasonable time to expect self-confidence in a person than in the immediate aftermath of a life-changing breakup?

I have always found confidence to be so elusive, so fickle. Confidence is like that brilliant, beautiful, and utterly captivating friend -- the life of the party, the one everyone else is so eager to claim as their pal. She's so vivacious and energizing to be around, but you can never really count on her, because you can never be sure when she'll show up. Some days, confidence slums with me as I go about my daily life. Other days, confidence is whispering in Taylor Swift's ear that she has interesting things to say in a song, even though she's only 23.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my relationship with confidence.

When I was in my mid-20s, I worked at a newspaper that exclusively covered horse racing, which has always been a very male-dominated sport. One of my coworkers was a woman about a dozen years older than me who was very knowledgeable in a specific area of horse racing, and in fact, held some rather unconventional views on that subject. I felt an immediate bond with her, because she was an expert in the same area that had first captured my obsessive interest in horse racing. I marveled at her ability to unequivocally state her opinion and then back it up with her exhaustive knowledge on the subject. She did not qualify her opinions with hedging statements, nor did she even slightly budge from what she said when she was challenged by male coworkers. She startled me with the self-assured way she expressed herself. She was the first women I admired for her confidence.

Every time she got into a discussion with a coworker about her area of expertise, I observed her as if she were a wild baby animal wandering through my backyard or a celebrity getting a latte at Starbucks. I was intrigued by the mystery of how she came to possess such unwavering, but fully warranted, confidence. By default, I chalked it up to her hard work and observational brilliance, but I knew there had to be something else in the mix that I just hadn't considered. Months later I got my answer, when I, along with the entire office, was surprised to find out that she was transgendered. She had made the gender switch to female years before when she was a young adult, after having been born and raised as a boy.

So, *that* was the missing penis-shaped piece of the puzzle. F*ck! Of course! The key to having unwavering self-confidence is to be born and raised as a male. It was a rueful tongue-in-cheek life lesson I've never forgotten.

Since then, I've met many other women I admire for their confidence. I've come to realize that confidence seems to manifest itself differently in women than men. Maybe I didn't admire a woman for her confidence until I was 27 years old because I didn't *recognize* it when I saw it. Women's confidence is usually quieter, and it's often less emotional than male confidence. (Unless it's confidence about physical appearance, in which case, both women and men are neurotic emotional wrecks.) And women's confidence always comes -- always -- after a lot of hard work, the paying-your-dues kind of work that takes years.

All of this is not to imply that men have it easy when it comes to confidence either. Confidence is elusive to many people of both sexes, often as maddeningly elusive as the middle-aged lifelong bachelor or a parking space at Costco the day before Thanksgiving. Since it's essential for success in so many areas, I will continue to woo my elusive, fickle friend back into my life on a more regular basis. Maybe we'll just be Facebook friends. Maybe she'll come over to my place once a week for coffee. Or maybe, just maybe, I will ignore my needy desire for confidence and just plod ahead one step at a time until my elusive, fickle friend automatically just starts showing up every day for a quiet walk together.