There was a long time after I graduated that I was not confident about anything in my life. I was an intern, I had no promise of continued employment nor the foggiest idea of what success, a career or feeling like I knew what I was doing, would even look like. It was an emotional albatross around my neck every morning as I walked a mile to the subway to go sit next to my co-workers, all of whom had full time real jobs that paid much more than $10 an hour and did not have a vague end date of Damocles hanging over their heads.
Toward the end of the first 3 month segment of my job I had to do a presentation about a personal project I had chosen to investigate at work. The feedback I got from the Department Head later was that I had too little confidence to take a forward facing role.
When he said that, I just felt like I had no reason to be confident. Everything I had ever been good at was no longer surrounding me. I had for the prior decade been good at school. School was a refuge. I could read books and I was told that I was smart because I could remember what I read in those books. But making the shocking transition to the real world took away all that structure. There was no more extra curricular leadership to affirm my abilities. There was just the everyday reminder that I had not been considered valuable enough to hire and that every day my relevance was in question. I felt there was no reason to be confident because I knew they barely believed in me so why believe in myself.
It was not the bad pay that hurt so much as the clear lowest position on the totem pole, "go buy me new headphones intern" status I had accrued in life. As college ended and I struggled to find a job I wanted to spend my life doing, all of my achievements started to wrap up and unravel all at once. On the one hand I was graduating from a great university and got honors on my thesis. On the other hand once I got to New York I was barely employed had no idea what I was doing with my life and one of my roommates was definitely pissing in bottles rather than going to the bathroom.
It took getting a job that I could actually succeed at to remember that I could believe in my own abilities. It took clearly succeeding in measurable ways to be sure that I wasn't going to just fail at life after college. The most terrifying part of it all was the idea that I might never land on my feet. That I could be someone who just floundered away their 20s. I felt plagued by my decision to work at a non-profit and to only work at a non-profit whose model I felt was valid. I felt like I had boxed myself in and might never climb out.
I don't think Bronx Housing Court is a place where a lot of people gain their confidence. But righteous anger is a powerful force in my life. Yelling at landlords and their attorneys in the hallway of Bronx Housing Court reminded me of my own abilities. I was reminded that I could bring words, logic and evidence down upon others like a cudgel, tearing through their condescension and poorly constructed arguments. I relearned the feeling of how through the rasp of my own voice and pointedness of my paperwork I could accomplish something. Helping my clients resolve their housing court cases or get enough additional time to avoid eviction put the taste of victory back in my mouth. Fighting for others allowed me to remember what winning felt like. What being in the right felt like. I try not to define myself by my job but it is hard to feel confidence when you are doing poorly (or nothing at all) between the hours of 9 and 5pm.
These days I don't go to the Housing Court but I still have the confidence to fight with words in the proposals I write and I have gained back the audacity to argue (maybe a little too often) in the meetings I spend my days in. But gaining some sense of my own confidence back has allowed me to succeed where I was previously stuck standing still. It took finding something I could win at once again to remind me how I had ever done it in the first place.
