Joy, Hope, and Self-Confidence
Understanding their happy dance is a key to wellness
I’m a superfan of joy.
Joy is my favored type of wonder (wonder having, neurologically speaking, two big buckets, awe-wonder and joy-wonder).
Wonder, which I write about in Buried Treasure: A Field Guide to the Life-Changing Magic of Revealing Yourself, is a way to spark your sense of hope — and hope is your access point to your personal agency or to your own power to create the life you want to live.
I nearly wee’d myself when I first mapped that out during research for the book.
I’ll repeat.
Joy sparks hope.
Hope triggers personal agency.
Personal agency is your access point to creating the life you want to live.
If I were telling you this story IRL you would see me doing a happy dance.
The role of self-confidence in this is, to me, a little trickier, but all-important.
The first novel I wrote, Rothenberg: The Shame Bath, sets out the origin story of a protagonist I work with often, Constance, Stan, Gardner, and the gnawing shame she had been tending.
I have wondered over the years about shame and all the ways it can slip into our lives, an insidious darkness that wafts into our souls like an odious odor, destroying any sense of joy one may have and capable of annihilating self-respect.
Shame’s opposite, according to the dictionary and many mental health professionals, is thought to be self-respect. I don’t strictly disagree, but I do have my own take on it.
Though self-respect may be the opposite, I think the antidote to shame is self-confidence.
I’ve spent a goodly number of years contemplating this. Being a word nerd, I have gone to the etymology of confidence. It’s from Latin, confidere, meaning to trust. In my personal lexicon, self-confidence is self-trust. Trusting myself. Trusting that I will act in a manner I respect. Self confidence has a forward leaning edge to it. Whereas, etymologically, self-respect has a backward glance, take a look:
Self-respect (noun):
Etymology: The term “self-respect” is a compound word formed from two parts:
- “Self-” — From Old English “self,” meaning “one’s own person, -self,” from Proto-Germanic *selbaz (source also of Old Norse sjalfr, Old Frisian self, Dutch zelf, Old High German selb, German selbst, Gothic silba).
- “Respect” — From Latin “respectus,” meaning “regard, a looking at,” from the past participle stem of “respicere,” meaning “to look back at, regard, consider.” It’s formed from “re-” (meaning “back”) + “specere” (meaning “to look at”).
It’s the “to look back at” that gives it the backward glance.
Self-confidence: I trust that I will.
Self-respect: I know that I have.
The nuance between these is essential for a soul such as myself who has experienced the disruptive nature of trauma. Trauma can and often does spark behaviors that have the power to annihilate the backward glance of self-respect.
I debated the words optimism and hope in much the same way for years.
I stumbled upon this by Irish Poet Laureate Seamus Heaney, and it all clicked into place: “Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.”
Optimism never felt right to me. Hope always did. Maybe it’s because I didn’t grow up expecting that things would turn out well, but I did believe in my ability to do what I thought was right for me.
Hope is the commitment to do the work. It is forward-leaning. Curiosity about, and doing the things that feel right and good to me brings me joy. A deep, happy dance kind of joy.
A central concept that trauma therapists work with is the notion of forgiving yourself for whatever it is you did to survive. I have trauma loops that play, their onset outside of my control, that are wiley and mean and shred at my self-respect, and that is why I bias to self-confidence over self-respect when tending shame.
My self-respect has been stripped away by others and by my own actions. That stripping away of self-respect can loop in a backward glance on the big screen of my mind.
Self-confidence, trust in myself, and conviction to do my own good worth working for are part of my current self — the self I have come to trust. My self-confidence and trust in myself are not stripped away when a trauma loop plays.
I have hope. I have joy. I have self-confidence.
Together, they can get me through a viscous trauma loop, a regular old bad day, and through things not turning out well.
The door to self-confidence is more readily accessed, and once it is, it can become an integral part of gaining or regaining self-respect. But, in my experience, it is the forward-leaning trust of self that comes first.
During National Wellness Month, try creating a dance party for yourself that gets you moving the happy dance of joy, hope, and self-confidence.
On my Happy Dance playlist are songs that get me moving, and once moving, even a painful backward glance loses its hold.
(PS: Do something. Do another soul a favor and add to the playlist — or share a song or two in comments that absolutely, positively gets you moving every time.)
I would love to hear your thoughts on the story in the comments. I’d also love to see your highlights, and claps are nice, too.
If you’d like to learn about my next book, Buried Treasure: A Field Guide to the Life-Changing Magic of Revealing Yourself, please subscribe to my Substack (all content is free).
