The Salad Dressing and Other Disasters

Confidence

I was always sort of doing the wrong thing at University. I think it's because I was thrown, not from a cliff or anything; but all the same, I found myself at sea, trying to swim in choppy waters, because I was thrown, thrown by one thing: that in every single tutorial, lecture, lunch, and dinner party, every single person that I met, could only be described as one thing: 

very, very, very confident. 

I, on the other hand was: 

very, very, very, very unconfident. 

In fact if confidence was available at the ATM machine, after putting my card in and forgetting the number then trying it again, the dark screen would have said, 'Dangerously overdrawn. Contact your bank immediately. Your situation is completely terrifying.'

I had always fantasised about being someone who was sure about things. Like men (much of the time) and cats (all of the time). But instead I wasn't sure. About anything. I mean how could you be sure? How were people sure? 

Anyway, not being sure, or having even a penny's worth of confidence, made me silent and Irish (well the Irishness got worse) and daunted and shy, and little, poor and plain and drawn (and overdrawn) and thrown and uncertain, and terrified and bewildered... all of the time. Except when I was asleep. 

The confident people were everywhere. They rushed around like loud tooting trucks on the motorway, beeping for me to get out of the way on my little blue bicycle (a non-confident color like a nearly light shade of blue). 

They were loud, tireless trumpets in the National Philharmonic orchestra, when I was a beginner violin, playing beside them with shaking fingers and a missing ear, probably. My light blue bicycle with only a single gear, or my little inadequate squeaky, wooden violin offering were always being stamped on and snapped in two by the likes of Rupert sitting there in his Gucci tan loafers (sock-less, obviously  to reveal his ankles that'd been bronzed in the French Polynesia). I was forever being silenced by polished English accents, and loud magnificent voices.

I've mentioned my Irish-ness obviously, and if I knew anything about psychoanalysis, I would immediately chart the source of all my difficulties back to my Northern-Irish childhood, which had, from quite a young age, paralysed any form of verbal communication whatsoever: you simply weren't allowed to speak most of the time. The teacher or your mum or the doctor or the minister did it all. And then in the one place that you might expect to be able to talk with freedom - that bleak stretch of concrete called the playground - you would frequently be invited to: 'shut up', 'mind your own', 'shut your mouth', 'shut your trap' 'shut your pie hole' 'talk to the hand'. Or you might be challenged with inquiries such as: 'who asked you?'  

Indeed, growing up in the North of Ireland in the 1980s meant you had about as much confidence as a chimney sweep in the 1880s. You were deprived of your self-esteem, and any kind of ambition whatsoever (who does she think she is?) and instead they shovelled on the shame, the blame, the doubt, the fear, the self-consciousness, and the self-pity; it made you nervous, anxious, tearful, fearful, shy, insecure, intimidated, passive, paranoid, and indefinitely silent unless you absolutely had to answer because you'd been spoken to by the teacher or your mother or the minister or the doctor or the headmaster. What was most important on these occasions was that you made absolutely sure you didn't ever say what you actually thought. You'd really be in trouble then.

Yes, where I grew up, everybody was suspicious of positive, bright, confident people. You were suspicious of the English, the Irish, the Americans, anyone who had been to the Continent on holiday, anyone who had an opinion, did well in school, spoke another language, had a different accent, a second car, a third TV or more than a fiver.