Ten days ago, I asked, what opposites do you combine? Never one to shy away from a question, I figured I’d take a stab at answering it.
The first opposites that came to mind for me are confidence and insecurity.
- Confidence: full of conviction, certain, having or showing self assurance or self-reliance
- Insecurity: not confident or sure, uncertain, not firmly fastened or fixed, not highly stable or well-adjusted
I’m not sure how both of these can fit together in one person, but they definitely do in me.
On one side, I don’t really care what other people think about me. I’m the rogue who purposely does things differently. That’s the confident side. On the other side, the insecure side, I totally care what people think about me.
For example, lazy, to me, isn’t all that bad, even though I know other people think it is. I’m fine with people thinking I’m lazy and thinking badly of me because of it. I want to change their thinking on laziness, but for now, I’ve given them, in my mind at least, a good reason to think the way they do.
It’s as though I don’t care if people think badly of me as long as they think badly of me for the right reasons, that is, reasons I purposely give them. In other words, I’m confident I’m right but insecure because I want everyone to agree with me.
I want to bend their reality to match mine. That’s how I combine both confidence and insecurity. If I were purely confident, I wouldn’t care about bending their reality. If I were purely insecure, I’d bend mine to match theirs.
You know, Stephen King once said that he writes to discover what he’s thinking. That’s what I just did.
