My road to this point in life has been a rocky, confusing one. A high school graduate in 2006, I attended one of the top universities in a town chock full of top universities only to hate it, the people around me, my major, and myself for all the financial turmoil and relational unrest it caused in my life and the lives of my loved ones. My walking papers from said university came in the form of a financial aid snafu: Paperwork for a scholarship for which I had just barely maintained the requisite GPA was mishandled by my aid worker, and my family was on the hook for $37,500.50. When our gold plated toilet seats and jewel encrusted toothbrushes appraised for far less, I was forcibly withdrawn and free to live and be and do.

I lived like a homeless skater, I did drugs, and I was an asshole to the people who loved me the most.

In 2010, after snorting, smoking, and popping my money, clear skin, and reputation away, I looked in the mirror and saw a shell of the person people told me I was destined to be. I don’t remember much of my life at this time, because drugs and memories make strange bedfellows, but I remember avoiding mirrors. For whatever reason, I had found myself in front of one. I found myself doing what I purposed not to do for months of my life: looking at myself.

It’s one thing to waste potential. It’s another thing to knowingly do so. My meeting with my bathroom mirror had shown me the culmination of my substance fueled rumspringe, and I was having none of it. I joined a gym, went back to church, apologized to loved ones, enrolled in a new school five hours away, and changed my phone number. My first university’s screw-up nearly derailed my college education…four times. But with some help from family, friends, and the kindest, sweetest dean in the world, I graduated with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy….at the ripe, old-ish age of 26.

Look out, world.

I assembled my internship and full time experience for my résumé and LinkedIn, and wrote a cover letter through which my personality shone for the world, or just a few HR departments, to see. I made plans: plans to move to Jersey permanently, to save money, to put a roof over my head, to pursue projects and endeavors that had been placed on the backburner in the name of the most expensive piece of paper I’d ever earned. Once I snagged a job I’d be off and running, the wind at my back, no mountain too high or valley too low.

That was two months ago. I’m writing this from the bed in my childhood room, sans job.

Self doubt is a foe I’ve had to deal with for most of my life, a fact I’ve come to terms with coupled with a dubious sense of pride. I’ve always been the bright kid. Well liked, intelligent, funny, athletic, with a good mother and a village of people who genuinely cared for me and took the time to steer me in the right direction. I was told by my Spanish teacher (to whom I should’ve listened when she told me to attend Wake Forest instead of N—————-)that I’d be a rich man before I knew it. My calculus teacher, a man I swore hated me, looked me in the eye and told me I could be the first Black President. At Rutgers, letters of recommendation came with encouragement and predictions of lofty positions and a laundry list of accomplishments. Among friends, I’ve been called an inspiration, a motivator, a leader, a genius, a powder keg of talent waiting to exlpode. So why, I often wonder, do I not see what others see? Why am I my own worst critic? Why do pages and pages of stories, essays, poems, songs, graphic design ideas, sit untouched for days, weeks, or years, when others see and lavish praise upon them? Why doesn’t my pen move like Hurston’s, my wit pierce to the heart of the issue like Baldwin’s, my prose uplift like Angelou’s? Am I too good for my own good, or, have I assembled a cast of loved ones too kind to do me any good?

Self doubt, or at least my brand thereof, makes me overly cautious and fearful, though not completely delusional to the facts. I am in a far better position than most. I am a Black man, free of arrests, armed with a Bachelors, free to determine my own destiny and more effectively utilize my agency like so many middle class Black folk before me. I have a loving and attentive support system and years of meaningful work experience. All is not lost. Even in the deepest of my pits of fear and loathing, I know all is not lost. A job will come, and so will a ticket out of my childhood room (which I will miss dearly, along with the rest of my childhood home and the angelic mother that resides herein) and into a place of my own, where space can be devoted to ideas and Nikes and art very likely to offend others. I am not a lost cause, merely a cause delayed.

But should I look deeper into this delay?

Should I know that this delay is indicative of my true talent level, my true place in the world? Has the world waited until now to show me that all of the talent I’m said to have is all for naught? Or is this simply the calm before the storm of opportunity and adventure set to unfold at any moment? Does the world have to catch up to keep pace with me, or slow its gait to allow me to keep in step?

Self doubt, if allowed to grow wild and free, will creep like a vine, choking out the dreams and goals it touches. If kept in check, it can push us to measure twice and cut once, to look a little longer before we leap.

And that’s all well and good. But for a recent graduate, broke, naked and afraid standing just outside the professional world and peering in, self doubt, depending on the day, is either a ferocious dragon or a shadow of one, and the fight against it can leave even the most hopeful browbeaten and defeated.

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