My beauty queen (not really but she could be) Ruby, is amazing. Smart, dynamic, funny. Talented. And ridiculously beautiful. What makes her even more beautiful is she doesn’t know how beautiful she is (that is a photo of her cruising the streets of Nicaragua last summer…stunning).

This 6’0 tanned, green-eyed, golden-haired goddess, with skin like porcelain, a 4.0 GPA and a heart of gold, suffers from an awful lack of confidence. She truly thinks “she is nothing great at all”.

Yeah, for real. Can you friggin believe that?

Listen, I get lack of confidence. When I was her age, I was her height, but wider. Much wider. With frizzy hair, braces, blotchy skin, a crappy GPA, a loud mouth and zero respect for authority or myself. And it was the 80’s, so it goes without saying fashion sense for a fat 80’s girl was bright and baggy and torn and ridiculous. Add to my lovely looks my charming contributions to society;  I was a kleptomaniac (another article), I had been in jail a few times (ummm yeah, other article), done a plethora of other unmentionables (did I say another article?) and was just an all around miserable little shit.

So super glad Ruby’s lack of confidence in life isn’t taking her where mine took me. But man, we both have/had it. That gut-wrestling torment of dealing with what we see/saw when we looked in the mirror.

Funny though -the output. How we both dealt with it.

Hers manifests a small, safe universe. Fear of leaping often resulting in not even trying. Turning away boys and new girl-friends who she truly feels she is not good enough for and staying close instead to a very small group of (sweet) friends who are equally fearful and isolated and intolerant of their own beauty and brilliance. Her small group of friends, as well as her books and volleyball, are about all she lets in to tiny center parameter of “stable and consistent” universe that she desperately wants to evolve, but just hasn’t cracked the code yet on how to.

My manifestation, and my world, was the opposite of hers. My lack of confidence reigned flat out ignorance; faking my life until I felt like I actually had one. Inventing bullshit stories all around me to make my life bigger, better and more secure than it really was.

I needed loud. I needed chaos. I needed drama. Boys had to rule (because if I were so ugly that boy wouldn’t “go for me – right? wrong. Another article). Parties and friends were my universe; I was loud, obnoxious, and to some degree even a bully – asserting my fake, stupid bullshit confidence over anyone who I thought was smaller, weaker and stupider than I actually was (because sure, I was qualified to make those determinations – not.).

I like to think I outgrew it. I tell Ruby she will too. I do the know the “secret” – that all that trash and self-defeating behavior is all in your head. You choose you become – You think you are, think it and you will be, you say you can’t and you can’t…..I can go on and on. I don’t diminish the power of these truths at all. I do know them, and it is my role as her mom to teach her that secret, to help her understand where this originates, and where it can end.

But very interesting to me in observation, how the same core issue of that dirty lens of how we all see ourselves, results in totally different behaviors in dealing with it.

Whose to say which is worse? Both hurt and sucked. Hers is safe. Mine was destructive. We both feel/felt bad in the midst of it. The awareness dulls us, stops us from being all we can be/were. It’s like a thick, smeary slab of “what the fuck?” smeared across the joy lens of our lives – and I desperately wish I could get that magic elixir to rub it off for her.

But I can’t.

So I tell her my stories. I tell her my lessons. I support and love and cheer her on. I work to give her tips and tools, and I pray. She’ll come out the other side. I already see sparks of it here and there. And I, her mom, her biggest cheerleader in the universe, am holding on tight, because when she figures that confidence thing out – when she learns to wear it like the goddess she is, and grows into the skin of beauty and radiance and brilliance God gifted her with – the world is going to rattle.