Note 7: self-confidence vs self-worth
I’ve been reflecting on why I had — and indeed, still have — an aversion to labeling this a “midlife crisis”. One major factor that I’ve identified is the lack of public discussions between men about their experience of their midlife crisis. This led to pop culture being pretty much the main influencer of my view of a midlife crisis. The construct I have in my head is reactive and rebellious, a straight man who’s made sacrifices to raise a family, and suddenly realizes that most of the dreams he had about his own life got lost in those sacrifices. It’s something you’re suddenly thrown into, and less something you seek out. If anything, seeking it out is weird. Society today tells us to run towards happiness. We don’t know what that means, but logic dictates that it lies in the opposite direction from suffering and pain (which a personal crisis implies). I believe that happiness, however you define it, is more likely to be found working through any suffering, than through running away from it.
I would say that the process I’ve been through — which I’m still going through — is more about taking inventory and integrating, than about rebelling against former choices and sacrifices.
One thing I realized sometime in my late thirties is that self-confidence and self-worth are two different things. Just because you have the former doesn’t mean you have the latter. High self-confidence is an excellent way of making up for a feeling of low self-worth, but it comes at a high price. Self-confidence comes from evaluating performance. It’s a volatile feeling where my most recent performance dictated my worth as a person. Self-confidence is like weather. Self-worth is like climate, a much more stable chaos that affects the weather. It’s an unconditional love for oneself that easily withstands the emotional storm caused by failure(s). In short: self-confidence is affected by external factors, self-worth is based on internal factors.
This worked well in my career: it drove me to perform in the top 25th percentile most of the time. Every time I completed a task, that performance filled up my self-confidence meter, and the fuller my self-confidence meter, the easier it was to fool myself and others that I also had a sense of self-worth. But there is one area where self-confidence cannot compensate for self-worth: relationships. Relationships grow out of organic play, rather than out of forced performance. Self-confidence dictated that I was only worth loving when I had done something good, and that feeling was always temporary.
Both self-worth and self-confidence are fed (or starved) through our interactions with others. Self-worth is fed through affirmations of love, delivered without a catch, through highlighting qualities. Self-confidence is fed through praise of actions and skills.
My sense of self-worth came from extrinsic factors rather than from intrinsic factors. Instead of asking myself: “do I believe in what I’m saying?” I asked myself “Do they believe in what I’m saying?”. I think this adds to my unease in social situations: instead of enjoying the interaction, I still feel some sense of obligation to make the time with me feel worth it. As a largely agreeable person with a need of being liked, I didn’t have much incentive to change that behavior: it was easy for me to network and make contacts and even friends. I can see how this mindset was very effective from many aspects. Except for dating situations.
My self-confidence didn’t spill over to self-worth. Every achievement started to fade as soon as it happened, and the process was like trying to run up a flight of ethereal stairs, where each step I passed started to fade and eventually disappeared. As I climbed higher and higher, the feeling that I was just a few steps away from falling became more dreadful. The higher I rose, the greater the potential fall. It was a lot like having impostor syndrome. This added to that constant buzz of anxiety I’ve been carrying around for most of my adult life.
The note here is: Self-confidence means believing in myself, self-worth means loving myself. My fear of failing, which in my definition includes everything from being wrong to making a fool of myself, has diminished and become manageable as my sense of self-worth increased. That constant buzz of anxiety is no longer constant. I wish I could share a silver bullet that helped me here, but this wasn’t fixed by a single life-hack. Many things contributed. The relationship with my husband helped me understand that I’m worth loving. Looking back at my experience, I realized that I had dealt with whatever life had thrown at me during my 40 years of existence. Perhaps not always in the best way, but in a way that got me where I was. It helped me stop judging my younger self for all those failures and mistakes (including this one). At 30, I used to believe that I had made it here despite being broken and a mess. At 40, I realized that I got here because of it.
