Maximum Insecurity Prison

That girl would never go for a guy like me. My resume isn’t good enough to apply for that role. I could never pull that outfit off. She’s not replying to my message because she doesn’t like me. And the list goes on. As human beings who spend 24/7 in our own minds, it is inevitable that we will have stages of thought that aren’t what we want to be thinking, which make us feel a way we don’t want to be feeling. As temporary as some of these negative thoughts are, there are some that we repeat to ourselves over and over again. We repeat these thoughts so often, that we start to believe our own negativity and we manage to convince ourselves that these thoughts are now a matter of fact. This is what we all know as an insecurity. As I walked through the streets of Paris with a friend two years ago, we were having a conversation about our respective insecurities, things that play on our mind sometimes. We discussed our respective levels of fat, I told him how when I go long periods of unclean eating, I develop a few extra layers of fat around my chest, sometimes referred to as “bitch tits”. I told him that I wonder about the size of my penis and whether it’s sufficient enough to appease the expectations of a woman. I told him that I’m aware that the size of my nose is potentially “above average” compared to my fellow humans. But ultimately, I told him that although I think about these things, I’m also extremely aware that I’m the only one that thinks about them, that nobody else is looking at me and worrying about that extra bit of fat, the size of my penis or whether my nose is bigger or smaller than theirs. Ultimately, I don’t allow myself to care so much about my own insecurities and all of a sudden, they stop being insecurities. Easier said than done? I made a huge discovery that day. I have been blessed over the years to have been extremely close friends (yes, platonic) with many females, many of which can be described as being any of; hot, sexy, beautiful, cute, etc. What I realised when walking and talking in Paris that day, is that all of these girls have opened up to me at some point about their own insecurities. These are the same girls that a guy would look at in a bar and think “that girl would never go for a guy like me”, yet behind the scenes, these same girls are thinking “that guy would never go for a girl like me”. Shocking! As I made this realisation and shared it with my travel buddy, I think it helped us both to realise that our negative thoughts, our insecurities are just that. They are our insecurities. We are the only ones that dwell on them and allow them to get in our way, to limit our self belief, to stop us from pursuing what we want. While we question our fat levels, the beautiful girl questions herself too, the hot guy at the gym wonders whether he’s intelligent enough, the 19 year old girls worries about being shamed and bullied for exploring her sexuality, while the 19 year old boy worries about not having started his exploration at all. Next time you find yourself worrying about what only you know about yourself, look around you. Your friends, your family, your colleagues, strangers in the streets, everybody is fighting their own mental battle, everybody has at least one thing, however small (pardon the pun) or big it is, that makes them question themselves. This article was inspired by some conversations I’ve had, both recently and over the years, that made me wish that those people I was talking to would think so much higher of themselves, because I knew that they deserved it and I knew that they were worth it. So next time you find yourself wondering whether your “bitch tits” look a little plumper than usual, whether your penis will be good enough to get the job done, or whether it’s a bad thing that you can inhale more oxygen through your nose than the average human can, take some consolation in knowing that we all have to fight ourselves sometimes, we all have that internal dialogue in our heads that isn’t the most supportive of us all the time, but just know that you’re the only one that is zoomed in on these thoughts, nobody else is thinking those things when you approach them for a conversation, they just see you for you, so just be the best version of you.