Why do people’s levels of confidence differ so much? Why does one person feel free to dress how they please, to follow their professional dreams and to pursue their own sexual tastes — while another spends their entire life in timidity, resignation and compliance? We can venture: confidence is the fruit of having been boundlessly and extravagantly loved by an adult in the early years. The strength to withstand attack, ignore critics and fight back against one’s enemies is — almost always — the beautiful, fortunate fruit of having felt indominably at the centre of someone else’s affection for as long as it took for our bones to harden and our spirits to rise. Confidence-inducing behaviour has little of the robustness of confidence itself. Its hallmark is tenderness. It starts with someone being profoundly pleased to see us when they pull back the curtains in the morning. We are their champion, their tiny button and their adored little rabbit. They love our limbs and our cheeks, our hair and our toes. When we are sick, they stay with us through the night. When we show them a drawing, they consider it with huge care. They hold our hand as we go to the park. They put cream on our blisters. They tell us not to listen to the schoolyard bullies. They make us feel at the centre of the universe. Thereafter, it simply doesn’t matter quite so much if the whole world decides it hates us. The love of millions won’t compensate for the absence of such love, and its presence will fortify us against all manner of opprobrium. We can’t go back and magically rediscover this emotional nectar, but it pays to know what we were deprived of and what hole we may therefore still have to fill. And if we feel solid in ourselves, we should be careful never to forget that there is a someone, most probably a ‘she’, in whose inordinate debt we are — and whom we might want to call soon to say thank you for our sanity.
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