© 2025 Richard Taylor
As a boy I lacked confidence. Oh, I jumped the gun a bit. I should have started with my name. Hello. I am Yoshi.
I didn't even know what confidence was. Consulting a dictionary years later I found this definition - "Belief in the effectiveness of one's own abilities". Which explains a lot. Back then I didn't believe I had any abilities. Every day we were bombarded with things we didn't know. What even is the pluperfect tense? Who were the Visigoths, really? And how does gravity work in empty space?
It was constantly drummed into me that I didn't know enough. I needed to study. If I didn't learn stuff then I would fail to achieve... and that meant I would probably starve. Or at best have to live on benefits and be despised by all the readers of right-wing newspapers who had achieved.
If only I had known then that most of my teachers were bluffing. Once in chemistry the teacher was showing us how distillation worked. He asked the class below what temperature water condenses. No-one else put their hand up so I did and said 100 degrees. He laughed at me. No-one else put their hand up so he told us it was 0 degrees.
Except I was sitting by a window that had condensation on it. It wasn't freezing outside or inside so the glass was not at 0 degrees. I was confused but I did not challenge him. He was confident. What did I know? The teacher had laughed at me. Everyone else thought I was an idiot. Cerys Jones thought I was an idiot!
Over time I gained a bit of confidence in specific contexts. Narrow areas. My exam grades were good. At school and later at University. So I knew some stuff. As long as I stuck to my subjects then I was fine. Just don't ask me anything about literature or art... or psychology, or physiology, or girls.
Actually, I was fine talking to girls. As long as it wasn't about me wanting them to be my girlfriend or anything. Lydia Robinson had asked me to be her boyfriend when we were 8 or 9. I didn't even know what that meant, then. When I said yes she smiled and told her friends she had a boyfriend now. We sat together on a school coach trip. It was nice but on the way back I wished I was sitting with Andrew Pearson because he was talking about a football match he had been to with his brothers.
I think I only managed to draw enough courage to ask girls out 4 times. Two said no, one of them with a strong hint of disgust. Two said yes, but one of those stood me up. I went out with the other one for about a year.
On the whole I didn't feel too bad about myself in my late teens and early twenties. In those narrow areas I had achieved something. It was possible for me to believe in the effectiveness of my abilities. Even when I was embedded in a constantly competitive environment, I managed to win some of the time. Enough of the time.
Then I fell in love. Which was brilliant.
Until it wasn't.
I won't go into details. Those tears have been shed. Suffice it to say that after nearly 3 years together she dumped me. And I didn't see it coming. I mean, at all. It was a total shock.
How could that happen? How could I not know. What kind of idiot is completely in love with someone who doesn't love them anymore. Without noticing.
Any confidence I had built up over the years evaporated in a moment. What's worse, she wanted to stay friends and I went along with it for 6 months hoping we would get back together. There goes my self-respect too. It was pathetic.
Eventually a friend convinced me to let her go... but as it happened she moved away before I said anything so I didn't even get to regain any control then, either.
In an effort to forget the immediate past I started letting the more distant past haunt me. Like the time one Christmas when Cerys Jones snuck a kiss with me under the mistletoe in the common room. She put her tongue in my mouth - which was something I had never experienced and certainly did not expect. She giggled - which at the time I thought was a playful laugh - but now I started to think she was probably mocking my naivety.
What did I even know about her? Nothing. I'd fancied her for most of my school life, but never really talked to her about... life or anything beyond school work. Idiot. People were beyond my understanding? That's how it felt, now.
Following the departure of the woman I thought I would eventually marry, I had plenty of time for work. I didn't want to do anything else. My work I understood. Everything else, I didn't. So I worked.
Let's not pretend I worked particularly hard. I spent a lot of time at work but much of it was just passing time, playing with stuff. Trying things out.
And I got lucky. I found a way to completely automate one of the business processes that normally took 3 people the best part of a week to complete every month. Management thought I was a genius. I got a promotion. More money. A new car I didn't need. People working for me to help speed up the next great idea I was supposed to come up with.
But I was angry. Management were taking credit for my idea when they didn't even know I was working on it. Marketing were trying to sell it to other businesses without knowing the first thing about how it worked.
I had looked up to those people. I thought they were all clever, or charismatic, or both. But the scales fell from my eyes. Suddenly it was clear. For the first time. Confidence is what stupid people have instead of knowledge, and what extroverts have instead of a genuine personality.
Confidence is a smoke screen. It's someone's belief in their own abilities... even when they lack any competence whatsoever. In fact, the less people know, the more confident they can be, because they don't know what they don't know. [This is called the Dunning-Kruger effect]
And the extroverts? Well, the more shallow you are, the better you get at hiding it with fake confidence in front of a crowd. Before shrinking with self-loathing and depression when you are alone?
That's what I thought anyway. I no longer cared about confidence. Instead I developed a strong sense of internal arrogance. Not singing my own praises to others. But knowing inside that I was better than most of them. All of them.
External events only added to my conviction of superiority over the average human. Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were clear proof of the folly of the masses. In the West at least. Despite my family's origins I knew very little about the East... and thanks to Band Aid I was sure that the whole of Africa was a basket case.
For a while I was happy. And successful. I also got massively into running and won a few small races. Adding physical prowess to my mental fortitude. Winner, winner, chicken dinner.
In 2020 both my parents died from COVID. They had underlying health issues. But the new "big C" was the official cause of death. For what that matters.
I went back to my home town for the funerals, at the end of the first lockdown. They had already been cremated, but my wider family wanted a ceremony with more than 2 people attending. It was the first time I'd returned in years. My boss insisted I take 2 weeks off, so I hung around for a while, with nothing to do. No-one to see.
One night I went to an old haunt. As I was at the bar a guy came up to me and said "Hey, Yoshi". He started talking about stuff I didn't remember. I had no idea who he was. But he knew me.
Then my heart skipped a beat. Was that Cerys Jones sitting there with two friends? Yes. I went over. They smiled. I asked them how they were and they said "fine". Cerys asked what I was up to and I told her about some of my achievements.
I thought she would be impressed. Assumed it. But she wasn't. Not at all. Nothing. Fell flat on my face. For months, if not years, I'd surrounded myself with people who at least pretended to be impressed by everything I said. Cerys burst that bubble. Just as she'd opened my eyes to French kissing.
It wasn't so much of a tactical withdrawal as me limping away with near-fatal wounds. I think I mumbled something about my parents and having to get back to work soon. Complete humiliation.
And what was Cerys? She was still stuck here. What had she achieved? But it didn't matter. I cared about what she thought. I was crushed that she didn't appreciate the magnitude of my wins.
When I returned home I was smaller. Silent. My parents' deaths had hurt, but they were not unexpected. Instead it was the surprise of Cerys Jones tongue that had changed me, again.
Hello, my name is Yoshi. I just found these notes and wanted to add a PS. Just to complete the journey, so to speak.
I did a lot of introspection over the remaining COVID years. Time spent alone. And then I met someone. She brought me back to myself. The real me.
Some people are born confident, some gain confidence and everyone else has the confidence of others thrust upon them in waves of impostor syndrome.
But confidence is an illusion. What I learned was that instead of believing in the effectiveness of your abilities, you should believe that you are a good person. And live that life. That is enough.