I’m going through one of those introverted, self analysis points of my life that seems to come each winter. I blame the lack of sunlight and the cold!! I’m definitely a creature that prefers things to be warm and sunny!!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about, is how I view myself. In a lot of ways, I am very confident. I can go into a new situation and hold my own. I can run a shoot, keeping things moving and running on time, and smoothly when tension might begin to build. But in a lot of ways, I’m still lacking in confidence. Or maybe confidence isn’t the right word, maybe self esteem is better, or self belief. When people compliment me on the things I can do, and the things I’ve acheived, I have to admit, I feel a bit of a fraud.
I know that I am able to take a good photo and good video, and I can edit them both as well. But when someone tells me that I am good at those things, I wonder if they really know that deep down, underneath, I’m making it all up. I’ve been asked to teach people how to set up lighting for video, and I showed them what I do, but all the time, I was really wondering “do they know that I’m making this all up? It’s probably not right, I’m probably doing it all wrong.”
I’ve had no formal training or tuition on how to shoot video, or take stills, I’ve taught myself as I’ve gone along, seeing what works, and what doesn’t, and learning and adapting from that. And somehow, to me, at times, it makes what I’m doing feel less valid.
I need to start learning to believe in myself and my skills. The fact that I get regular work from other people should help me to believe that I can do it! I know the people I work with well enough to know that they wouldn’t keep asking me back if I wasn’t doing a good job. I need to stop dismissing their compliments when they give them to me. They’re not just saying these things for the sake of it, they’re not under any obligation to make me feel good about myself, they don’t *have* to say those things if they don’t mean them.
Every so often I have little glimpses of what it must be like to have self belief, or belief in my skills. I’ve found myself wondering today about what avenues I should persue to publish my novel (which, at this point is still unfinished!). But then another part of me is there saying “don’t be so stupid, you’re not a writer, you can’t get published.” So there is hope in me learning to believe in myself, but I think it’s going to take a while to get there.
(I would just like to add, this isn’t a post which is fishing for compliments…. It is just something that I’ve realised about myself recently that I wanted to write about, to see if that helped kick-start the process!!)