I Fear Everything: missing out

Confidence or over-confidence?

Call me a snob, but all my life, I looked at how my peers had been brought up – how they acted towards their elders, how they spent their free time, even how they came to school in the morning – and was convinced my parents had done the best job ever with my siblings and I. Judgemental little shit, wasn’t I? But I was happy. Happy in the knowledge that I was a balanced individual ready to take on the world; happy in the knowledge that my parents had surely provided me with all the necessary skills I needed to succeed.

Coming to university kind of threw a spanner in all that. Suddenly I was faced with the knowledge that all my parents had done (I say “all they had done”, they’ve still done a great job and I’m grateful) was provide me with the skills to be a nice and fairly intelligent human being. However nice doesn’t automatically equal success. I immediately developed an inferiority complex. Everyone here seemed so much better off than me – I don’t mean money-wise, I didn’t care much about that – but in confidence levels and experiences. If I was well read, they were ridiculously so; if I’d done work experience on a local paper, they’d worked on a national one; if I professed ambitions to write a novel, they’d already written one… or five.

It was the international students that got to me most. Don’t get me wrong, they’re all lovely and I’m not saying anything against them, but I was just so jealous! To have lived in another country, experience another culture, speak more than one language: these were things I had always wanted – and things that I knew would have increased my levels of confidence to pursue my dreams. At least that was how it became constructed in my head. I couldn’t compete with them, not little naïve country girl me. I’d never been in the sort of situations, never had the opportunities. I didn’t have the multicultural, multi-lingual upbringing… and I hated it – because I was afraid I was missing out; that somehow, somewhere in an alternate reality there is a me whose dad took that job in Germany and sent me to an international school. A me who has stacks of confidence, international friends, stacks of “skills” (whatever the hell those are) and important contacts for my future life.

Of course, this is stupid. Students are students and every one of us is different – stereotyping like this isn’t going to make me any better. Each one surely has the ability to succeed if they really put their mind to it. Possibly I’m just trying to cover my laziness. Yet however irrational it is, I still feel like I’m constantly fighting to keep up. In my degree, in my society work, in my social life… in fact, I was spurred to write this blog by the terrible feeling that if I didn’t get involved in the campus media of some sort, I’d miss another opportunity to boost my confidence.

I don’t want to live like this. I don’t want to do things because I’m scared I’ll miss out to those that do; I want to do things because I want to do them. If I continue to attend every single voluntary lecture, every single society meeting of my ridiculously high number of societies… I’ll burn out long before the end of university, consumed by a black feeling that I’ll never be good enough.

So, okay, what I’m afraid of isn’t exactly the feeling of missing out; what I’m afraid of is that this fear will ruin my chances of ever feeling like I’m not.

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