The Hesitant Believer

Description

You are thoughtful, capable and often generous in the way you see the people around you. You can recognise what someone else brings to a room, encourage them when they are struggling and see the potential in them long before they can see it themselves. You understand that people make mistakes, that nobody gets everything right and that either all or none of us should be judged by our darkest days. You can offer that understanding to others quite naturally, but when it comes to applying it to yourself you feel a resistance.

The tension is that you have made yourself the exception to the understanding you extend so freely to everyone else. When something goes well, you find reasons it might not count. When someone recognises your contribution, you wonder whether they have seen the full picture. When you get something wrong, you can turn a perfectly ordinary human experience into a much bigger question about whether you are capable enough, talented enough or deserving enough to be where you are. You are not necessarily lacking confidence in every area of your life but it is more that you struggle to let the evidence of your own worth become something you can actually trust.

Over time, you can become so accustomed to questioning yourself that even the things you do well begin to feel like things you have somehow gotten away with. You keep working, keep improving and keep trying to become someone you can finally believe in, without realising that the person you are trying to prove yourself to is the one who keeps moving the finish line.

The next step is to start looking in, actually recognising the good inside of you and realise that if given the choice you would not choose to be anyone else.