Self-Doubt is (Still) My Default Setting

Thumb is in California, camera is in Oregon.

Everyone fights with self-doubt. It’s natural, it’s human, it’s part of life. Unless you are a billionaire douchebag running for president, you have moments in your day where you just aren’t sure of yourself.  The common salve for this pain is to simply believe in yourself. To me, that’s like telling someone who is struggling with obesity: “Hey, don’t be fat.”

Self-doubt is nothing unique, but there is a subset of people, of which I am a member, where self-doubt is the underlying theme of one’s life.  Everything in our lives has doubt attached to it at its inception, and we have to fight to reverse it.   All. The. Damn. Time.

Daily, I have to remind myself of the things that aren’t broken in my life.  I have plenty, too.  Things are thankfully going well these days, and I’m appreciating this and aware of this. But these are actions I must take.  I don’t wake up feeling awesome.  I need something to kick in and tell me things are cool. My default setting is dark and gloomy and impending doom.  Hey man, today you have some work, you get to work on your book and this weekend that movie comes out that you want to see. I am reminded that things are going well, then I can feel happy for the rest of the day.  The next morning, it starts all over again.

When things aren’t going well, (in my pre-Zoloft days, was almost all the time in my head) self-doubt, and all the sludge that comes with it felt oh-so-normal.  Nothing was worth the effort because if I had anything to do with it, it was going to suck.  My writing was just journal entries; bitching and moaning. 

Everything changes when I understood the importance of decisions in your life.  Not choices; I’ve never liked that word, really.  I don’t care about the options out there.  The options are where all of life’s arguments begin.  What I mean is, the decisions you make to live your life the way that works for you.  You make those decisions and you deal with the sacrifices and consequences that come with them.

Self-doubt is nothing but “I’m not sure.” A decision can be interpreted as “I’m not sure either, but I’m doing it anyway.”

So, that’s all cool. 

However, just like an ex-smoker chews gum or eat Twizzlers to satisfy the oral fixation that still plagues them, there are plenty of behaviors us self-doubters don’t even realize we possess.  Even if we have a handle on the doubt, we have a lot of shitty habits that still get in the way.

I do not know how to promote myself.  I have a nearly finished, fun book that will be thrust out into the world in a month or two.  A confident person would already have a marketing strategy in place to promote and hopefully sell this book to as many readers as possible.  My brain won’t even let me think of that.  Honestly.  Every time I try to learn about that shit, I get distracted by Facebook, something on TV, a squirrel outside of my window. 

Self-doubt is saying: Who the hell are you?  Who would read your dumb shit?

I should be in a writer’s group.  It would be great to have a few outside opinions and I need an opportunity to meet people. I am not in one.  They exist; they’re all over the place around here. I can’t bring myself to join. It doesn’t matter that the room is full of people in the same boat as I am, thinking similar thoughts.

Self-doubt is saying: Everyone there is better than you.  They won’t respect you when they discover how bad you suck.

This is want I want to do with the rest of my life.  I have forsaken all the other interests and hobbies so I can improve as a writer.  I want to imagine myself as a published writer with a following.  I want to imagine myself doing this professionally, where all my work life is centered on creative ideas and figuring out stories and making them work.  My brain won’t let me think of that for more than two seconds.

Self-doubt, that unbridled asshole, is saying:  Success is for other people. It’s too late.  You’re kidding yourself.  You aren’t any good.

So what do you do?  Every morning, every single morning, you have to remind yourself of what’s good and what’s working in your life.  You can’t give self-doubt an inch of room.  This process is exhausting, but the alternative is…well, I don’t know what the alternative is anymore, so that’s a step in the right direction.