I know how it sounds. Too confident. Too sure. A little too quick to defend what I’ve written. There’s an expectation — especially when you’re just starting — that you should be a little uncertain. A little self-deprecating. Grateful for any attention, any validation, any room you’re given. You’re supposed to earn confidence slowly.
But if you wait to feel ready, you’ll be quiet forever.
They smell hesitation
You don’t have to say you’re unsure. People can tell. It shows up in how you talk about your work, how quickly you downplay it, how easily you let someone else define its value before you do. And once that hesitation is there, it sticks. People mirror it.
If you treat your writing like something fragile, something questionable, something that still needs approval, they will too. They’ll read it with doubt already in mind. They’ll approach it like it’s something provisional.
Confidence is positioning
Being confident about your work doesn’t mean you think it’s flawless. Confidence shouldn’t be equal to blindness.
It’s actually choosing to stand by the work as it exists, not as some hypothetical, perfected version that only shows up after endless revision and external approval. Because if I only allowed myself to feel confident once everything was undeniably perfect, I’d never feel it.
And more importantly, no one else would either.
There are too many voices, too many opinions, too many people ready to tell you what your work should be. Some of them are helpful. Some of them are not. But if you don’t have a strong internal stance — if you don’t already believe your work deserves space — you become easy to reshape. You start adjusting too quickly. Cutting things you didn’t actually want to cut. Softening ideas. Rewriting your voice into something more acceptable, more marketable, more digestible. Yuck!
For your consideration
To be clear, this isn’t about pretending.
People can tell the difference between someone performing with confidence and someone actually grounded in their work. Performance is loud but unstable. It needs constant reinforcement. It crumbles the moment it’s challenged. Real confidence is harder to move.
It doesn’t mean you reject feedback or that you think you’re above critique. It just means critique doesn’t dismantle you. You can listen. You can revise. You can grow. But you can also decide what stays.
Confidence is what lets you filter instead of absorb everything indiscriminately. It lets you hear “this doesn’t work” without translating it into “you don’t work.” Without it, everything becomes personal. And when everything is personal, everything has the power to stop you.
So be it
People like to separate the writing from everything around it, as if the work exists independently from how it’s carried into the world. It really doesn’t. The way you talk about your work shapes how others approach it. The way you stand behind it influences whether others take it seriously.
I’d still rather stand behind my work than watch it get eaten alive while I apologize for it existing.
— Montse
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