Self-diffidence.

Lonesome and wretched is one who arrives at self-diffidence. I am being diffident to myself. I’m not the only individual with emotional skin marred by lesions of doubt; not here, not now. Not that this does anything to comfort me. Accusers of severity say: “What do you think you’re the only one? Deal with it. Suck it up,” while the voices of mercy plead “Know that you’re not alone, others understand and suffer as you do.” Trite responses from vain people with no power to heal the hearts of those dying the living death. Their words bland and empty, devoid of soothing or salvation, serving only to further embitter me against any hope that someone will utter magic words capable of knocking this wall around me down.

Then of course there is the camp that insists one’s self is the only being with the ability to demolish the confines of personal prison. Total crap. I’ll be sure to disprove this in some other exposition if and when I get around to it, but trust me when I say that this sentiment – at best – amounts to interpersonal laziness, not to mention a lack of leadership, imagination, and determination. I think Christ understood this and exchanged grace for the transgressions of the ignorant, fleshy masses saying  “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do.” I on the other hand have yet to discover and extend such divine forgiveness, at least in a sustainable form.

Furthermore, there’s the argument that such forgiveness is not to be found but created. And not just created once but constantly created. Little good this does for one who finds themselves in a life-time long want of motivation for such efforts. I simply do not believe this. Perhaps it’s a matter of building momentum in one’s ability to summon merciful sentiment for others until it cements into second nature. To me, if this is the case, it’s an awful lot like staring at a pendulum and waiting for it to move itself. I am without desire or motive to move, at least as far as I can detect. A ship on the ontological sea without a gust of wind to push me forward. I have no wind in my sail to head toward kinder shores. I drift. I languish.

Want of Confidence

Diffidence may be defined as “a want of confidence.” I am being diffident – in want of confidence. And the confidence I’ve had the majority of my life seems now to have been enthusiasm congealing into grift, not trust.

You see it for me is a question of confidence (it in this case being my nameless, faceless, counter-part of mine that haunts me, stalks me, and undoes my doing at each and every turn). It seems to me now that true self-confidence is not something I developed. Esteem as such is missing. However what I’ve been able to get by on is courage. I thought myself for years a coward, and in some contexts I have effectively pissed my pants in the face of adversity, instead of meeting it head on. However, in the wake of having distinguished confidence from courage, I see myself more as having been the lion, roaring and resisting, however for reasons I won’t go into now, rendered harmless without tooth or claw.

That all being said, I will admit that in recent years I’ve abandoned courage in favor of cravenness as I’ve found the sum result of courage without confidence equals out to vanity and destruction. So I’ve taken myself out of the game. Without trust in oneself no house built upon the foundation can stand. It will collapse. And so it has, and I lay underneath the wreckage.

And so I continue drifting. Aimless. Listless. Without cause. Without confidence. Without trust.

Without Faith.

Confidence. Confidere. Con- + Fidere. “With Faith.”

Lacking self-confidence, I lack faith in myself. I am without faith in myself. With out-faith in myself. “Out” is a preposition; position dealing with spatial relations. I am, in essence, outside the boundaries of “faith in myself.” There is distance, emotionally, between myself and my tabernacle of confidence. It’s like I’m playing a game with myself. I can’t understand it at this time. I’m aware of it, yet this awareness changes nothing.

I exist outside the boundaries of self-confidence, trust in myself. I am excluded from my self-confidence. I exist in the absence of faith. The absence of faith precedes the experience of the absence of God, which is in essence, the experience of Hell. Hell comes from the idea of hiding; hiding from God. Hidden from God. Hiding one’s self from God is hiding one’s self from love. Faithlessness can thereby be defined as the absence of love. I am being faithless.

I don’t understand it anymore than probably 99.99% of the people having this experience called human being.

Still I persist. Like little, frozen Pluto so far from the warmth of the Sun.