Side pack + Friends One Shots

Are You Ready?

Confidence is an amazing tool, It can help you feel better than you are about a lot of situations, and it can also trick your brain temporarily into a situation that you would otherwise be terrified in.

For the last 5 to 7 years, I've had no confidence in my own abilities.

During school it would be my intelligence, whether it was due to the fact that I couldn't understand the work I was given, Or I simply couldn't answer a question on a test.

I had no confidence in my writing ability as I had been told numerous times before I had no creative bone in my body, and I had no chance of ever doing anything with literature and to not even bother trying if J couldn't even write an essay. (Long story short I had never even been told at that point what an essay was)

That was all during year 7 and 8 of high school. When I hit year 9 I was terrified and had no confidence for very different reasons. This time I no longer doubted my intelligence, I knew I was smart, I just had to do things differently to get the same result and my math teacher helped me do this. But my main issue with confidence was that I not long came out gay. It destroyed my confidence in myself because in my mind, I was ready to tell someone and I did, I told two of my best friends who I had trusted since before high school.

During that time, while the three of us were talking about it and how I felt, another student must have over heard or got it from someone I don't know. But let's just say the last thing you need when you have only recently came to terms with your sexuality and then been able to use that surge in confidence to do anything... It becomes hell when someone decides to tell everyone in the school about your sexuality. And that hurts. Not because he was jealous but because I didn't tell him first. He thought he was my best friend and because I didn't tell him first, he told everyone knowing I wasn't ready.

I felt alone and I felt scared, because it felt like a punch to the face over and over again. It's up to me, and should be my decision when I'm ready to talk about it and who I tell and how and that got taken away from me.

Yes I am a confident person in my own skin now but back then, I was suicidal and it hurt. I was in a horrible and disgusting mind frame that would scare anyone. But being suicidal isn't the worst part.

The worst part is that I lost almost everyone I had around me at the time, including one of my best friends because he was scared for himself. Looking back on it I don't blame him, but when I needed him to help me, He got scared by other students with the off hand comments made. It was one of the worst feelings in the world but funnily enough, there is one good thing that came out of it.

It was the boys that tried to help me when I broke down or needed it, not the girls, even the other gay kids wanted nothing to do with me because I wasn't the same way, I wasn't the feminine type of gay. And I haven't been ever. I have moments but I'm a pretty straight acting type of guy most of the time.

It also didn't help that I couldn't do it, yes I know that's a terrible thing to say when talking about suicide, but I couldn't do it, not because I learned to love myself or because I failed in my attempts, but because my mind and my brain functions differently to others. I was able to subconsciously talk myself out of any situation, there was always a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that it's not time yet don't you dare.

During this time I was unable to do sports at all so I started falling heavily into gaming which kind of started to rebuild that broken confidence. Getting lost in a big world like final fantasy or taking control in games like assassins creed when it was released and I got it. It helped to rebuild that confidence because I was in control of the world, I controlled when I would run or fight and I feel like that became my saving grace in a lot of ways.