I suppose there are people in this world who never experience self-doubt, who enter any task expecting that what they do will be good — great, even — and that they and their effort will be well-received by others. I suppose those people glance in the mirror on the way out the door and think looking good today! If they notice their flaws, since everyone has flaws, I’ll bet those people put them in perspective against their own strengths, or against the fact that everyone has flaws. If anyone knows one of these people, I’d love to meet him or her. (And I’ll bet most of these people are men, if they exist.) I’m not talking about arrogant grandiose narcissists, just regular people with an overwhelmingly positive view of themselves.

But for everyone else, we are peppered by little things all the time, things that may be unique to us for whatever reason, things that are common among people in some particular group (e.g., body image issues for women, skin color issues). The little thing that just speaks into our ear so casually and so often that we may not even notice it. Sometimes those self-doubts are in someone else’s voice — a critical parent, maybe, an old boyfriend — but they sound so smart and true.

Some of these things can be tackled head-on. While it’s obviously much more complicated than this one-note suggestion sounds, this isn’t trivial. Feel bad about your body? Find something physical to do that makes you feel good about your body (and in doing the thing that makes you feel good about your body, you’ll probably notice physical changes in the areas you didn’t like, coincidentally). So for me, learning and living with strength training last year made me feel SO GOOD in my body. I didn’t feel ashamed, I walked around inside my body, yeah, my body, feeling so good. So it wasn’t about the “not” — not eating, not thinking I’m fat no I’m not I’m thin (which I’d have known to be a lie) — instead it was about doing. Doing something in my body and the rest followed. [note to self: remember??? get back to the strength training full-time!] Feel like you’re not using your brain or your education? Challenge yourself to read a book you always thought was too hard.

But you know what else you should do? LISTEN TO OTHER PEOPLE. I don’t know why it’s so hard to take in the positive things people say, why we prefer to clutch our grim beliefs, why we hear them and then think yeah, but….. Late last summer, due to personal circumstances it appeared I might be leaving the poetry group, and when one woman in the group heard that news, she wrote me a kind note that included this:  “Your comments are so on the mark (and I don’t say that only because you “got” my poem last time). I also like the way you read aloud. And as if that’s not enough, you’re delightful company.” It was a wholly unexpected comment, and it hit me right in the specific places I felt most uncertain; it was almost as if she looked into my mind and saw the three dark spots where I felt weakest and most vulnerable. I have no training in poetry, I don’t know forms and meters and all that stuff. And when I read poetry aloud, I don’t put on that weird fake “poetry voice” and read in a pausing stilted way, I just read it in my regular voice, a little more slowly than usual, and go with the punctuation as it presents itself. And I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing, I was the dumb one in the group. The others write poetry, I just bring in poems that other people write. I felt like the obvious loser of the group.

But that’s not what at least one other group member was feeling — her feelings were the counterpoint to my own. It was the surprise unsolicited aspect of her note that made her comments carry the weight. I was stunned, and since then my sense of myself has shifted a little bit in this area. It was easy enough to go ahead and believe her.

As I’ve mentioned before, the very best part of my 40-day project has been (and continues to be) the morning love and gratitude email I write. I don’t write them with the expectation of getting a response, and some people don’t respond. But most people do, and they talk about their surprise. Maybe we trust the surprise things most of all (the unsolicited kind words, the smile in traffic or at the grocery store that comes out of the blue, and when we most need it) because we didn’t have to ask for them. Those things have so much power; after all, I’ve remembered that one smile for more than 30 years, and it always make me smile and feel happy when I recall it. I’m not quite sure why we don’t tell people all the good things we think about them, why we reserve those thoughts for certain occasions, but I am quite sure that it would be a nicer world if we shared them more often.

Flying home tomorrow, so I probably won’t post again until Wednesday. I’m on a bit of a rollercoaster right now and feeling kind of queasy. More when I can share.