How I destroyed my confidence
If you’d like to watch the video version of this post, you can do so below.
If there’s one thing you need to know about me, it’s that I am self-conscious as f*ck. How I got to this point can be summed up in one sentence: “They can’t make fun of me if I make fun of myself.”
Who is they? Why did I make fun of myself? And how did that lead to low self-confidence? Well, allow me to take you on a little journey.
Confidence deficiency
Self-confidence is something I always sucked at, and being bullied in middle and high school didn’t make it any better. I used to get so upset about it and didn’t know how to defend myself. I wasn’t quick on my feet to throw insults back at my bullies, but when I thought of the perfect response—it was two weeks later. Suffice to say this put me in a vicious feedback loop where:
I have low confidence
Someone makes fun of me
I can’t respond until it’s too late
My confidence drops further
And the cycle repeats
This exasperated my timidity and made it almost impossible for me to have any semblance of belief in myself—so much so that I couldn’t even make decisions on my own anymore. I needed a way to combat those bullies so I could build my confidence from the ground up. Then, one day, I saw a video by Brooks Gibbs, a social psychologist specializing in resilience training, that changed my perspective on responding to them.
The technique
In a nutshell, Gibbs explains that a bully’s objective is to have power over their victims in their interactions. The angrier the victim gets, the more fun the bully has, and they keep going. But what would happen if the victim instead responds with indifference and stops caring what the bully says? The bully will eventually get bored and will leave them alone.
That realization turned my world upside down.
I finally cracked the code to solve the one thing that made me more miserable than anything else—so all that was left to do was to put it into practice. There was only one problem:
I had already graduated from high school and never saw my bullies again.
So, a normal person would be grateful not to deal with people like that anymore, but would be prepared to confront them in the future if they do come again.
Unfortunately, I’m not normal.
If I agonized all these years to find a solution to the problem and it magically disappears one day, you better believe I’ll find another use for it.
How I used it, and how it backfired
If you’re indifferent to a bully, it exudes confidence and shows that what other people say about you doesn’t bother you. So, I had to find a way to show that I was comfortable with myself and my shortcomings. In other words, a way to show that I’m confident.
Enter: self-deprecating humor.
This is where the idea I mentioned in the beginning comes in: “They can’t make fun of me if I make fun of myself.” Except, now that there was no one to make fun of me, I had to find another reason to make fun of myself.
As we all know, one of the best ways to connect with people is through laughter. If you both laugh at the same thing, it becomes much easier to relate to one another. In that case, self-deprecating humor allowed me to kill two birds with one stone: show off my newfound confidence and connect with people by laughing at myself. What could possibly go wrong?
You see, it served me well in the beginning. I connected with many people and made them laugh extensively. But over the years, something started to change.
I started believing what I was saying.
Whether it was making fun of my indecision or my immigrant background, I didn’t spare a quality in myself without roasting it. Eventually, all these thoughts combined absolutely wrecked whatever confidence I had left. I genuinely believed everything I said about myself and found myself back at square one.
How it affects me to this day
The worst part about low confidence is that people can smell it from a mile away. Once they do, they start treating you exactly how you treat yourself. With low confidence comes low self-respect, and as a result, people’s respect towards you is diminished.
I ended up creating a false version of myself that I thought people would like and relate to more than the real version. Instead, in a cruel twist of fate, people did not respect that false version that tried too hard.
That reminded me of a principle in psychology I read from Mark Manson called the Backwards Law—the more you try to achieve something, the more you will fail to do so. The more effort I put into being confident, the less confident I felt. The more effort I put into making others respect me, the less they did.
And that’s when I finally understood that self-deprecating humor is a fine balance. If you overuse it as a crutch to appear confident, you will come off as insecure, and people will treat you as such. But if that humor comes from a place of self-awareness and being comfortable with your drawbacks, then others are more likely to respect you as a result.
The recovery
I ended up trying to fix a problem with the wrong solution. I learned that it’s not what you say or what kind of joke you make about yourself that will make people relate to you. It’s how you carry yourself and how comfortable you are with your flaws and insecurities. Only by making peace with them can you start to make fun of them—not to draw a cheap laugh from the other person. Then, and only then, can self-deprecating humor be an asset rather than a drawback.
My goal will be to avoid using it as a crutch to relate to the other person. Instead, I’ll engage with them in more thoughtful discussions by being vulnerable because that’s what creates the strongest connection there is. Only when the opportunity presents itself will I make fun of myself rather than shoehorning it in. The only difference is that it’ll be coming from a place of self-respect, as paradoxical as that sounds.
