Learning to Trust yourself

It's kind of hard

Having recently graduated, this Substack has inadvertently become a home to the musings of an “adult.” The idea to document random ideas stretched back to Freshman year of university, inspired by my grandmother’s use of a diary and a curiosity to document the evolution of my thought process. It was a private google doc without much structure and gradually tapered off into an untended tapestry of infrequent, angsty outbursts. I was then motivated by the encouragement of a fantastic graduate teacher, Erika Stewart, who takes pride in raising up and energizing the often-confused mass of students under her care. Funnily enough, I had a similar experience in high school from my calculus teacher, Daniel Kumprey, who almost certainly had the greatest positive influence on my academic upbringing and concluded our mentorship with a compassionate, insightful letter of praise and a few math problems to test my mettle. I still hold onto that letter and plan to as long as I’m able.

During internships and countless friendships, exposed to great plethora of minds and insights I could never have found on my own, I’ve been told time and time again that I have potential and a good nature. And I told myself I believed them and was constantly learning yet was still inexplicably shattered when my expectations were subverted or when things went wrong. We play countless head games to try and understand ourselves, often in terms inarticulable and highly multifactorial, an impenetrable fog of the brain. But simply put, I never earnestly could bridge that gap: the trust between the character I’d build for myself in the world and who I felt I was at my core, which of course most of us have difficulty discerning in the first place. And it’s reasonable to feel this way; the ripples of life are unendingly turbulent and the process of learning and challenging our preconceptions is seemingly without summit. Good behavior is often unrewarded or even punished, and vice versa for bad behavior. Often, we find ourselves acting in ways that we regret or that turn out worse than planned, inflicting harm and unsure of how to feel in the chaos.

If you were a tranquil sailor, perhaps a wandering traveler, in the serene stillness of a pond, then the worldly influences - from the grand tides of worldly affairs to interpersonal interactions to emotional turmoil you feel down to your core - all produce ripples that culminate in a chaotic turbulence. Furthermore, we live in times where great tsunamis threaten to capsize us all. And to distinguish our ship from the ripples themselves is no small task either, where lines blur and definitions break down incessantly. That we are forced to become competent sailors, a truly monumental task, is arguably a cruelty of life. We cannot live life as we please in perfect accordance with our ideals, nor can we grit our teeth and pray for the storm to pass. To progress from that lonely traveler, the child gazing at clouds and staring at patterns in the ceiling tiles, to a captain capable of navigating these waters, may well be a primary component of life itself. Admittedly it’s a cheap shot, given that what constitute waters, the ship, and turbulence itself are vague generalities that can fit any, more substantial model. But I figured this captures the mentality I’ve developed and am working with at this early point in my life, taking that hesitant step towards finally trusting my piloting skills.