Seeking Courage

(Nimue)

I started thinking about courage as an issue back in 2020. I had at that point recognised my own lack of it and had no real idea what to do. I’ve learned a lot in recent months and, facing some serious challenges I find I have the courage I need. So, what changed?

Life is full of things to be anxious about. Sooner or later we all face things that may overwhelm us or defeat us. Ultimately everyone dies. So courage is not a state of being oblivious to all of this. Courage is about how we meet life, and that – it turns out – has everything to do with how we feel about ourselves.

Looking back I can see that what caused the problems was my lack of faith in myself. This was largely a product of being gaslit, and of experiences that needlessly undermined my confidence in myself. This year I’ve been able to do a lot of rebuilding.

At this point I have confidence in myself as a person – that I’m good enough, capable enough, clever enough and that I can make a difference. I’m good at understanding things, figuring things out and finding solutions. I have the tenacity to keep going. I am able to be good and useful and to act in meaningful ways. Armed with these things I can face whatever I have to, confident that I can do my best and that my best will be acceptable.

I can’t fix everything or solve everything. Loss of courage may come from being made responsible for situations where there is truly nothing you can do. I don’t have to solve everything. It is enough to meet the challenges, bringing what love and kindness I can. It is enough to try, because it’s the trying to take care of each other that makes life bearable and good things possible. You can do your very best and still not win, but at the same time doing your best is all there ever is.

I’ve been exploring the ways in which my struggles with anxiety have been about a loss of confidence in myself. It’s not the rest of the world I’ve been afraid of, but my own inability to meet challenges effectively and with integrity. Having come to see myself as useless and difficult, I’d become deeply anxious that anything I did would be wrong in some way. I’d been persuaded that I was a problem and that I couldn’t get anything right.

My partner Keith has spent a lot of time in this last year trying to change how I think about myself. He reassures me that I am not going to get things horribly wrong, that it is ok to make normal, human mistakes and that my inclinations are good. Over these months he’s helped me rebuild some confidence in myself as a person, and this makes it considerably easier to act.

I’m in no doubt at this point that I can be good. I’ve seen what I’ve been able to do this year, and what I might yet do. I’m more hopeful, and more certain. It’s not so difficult to find courage starting from where I am now.