Strength in Certainty

Guest authored by Sylvia Riege.

For a long time, one of my biggest pet peeves has been with people who act (or pretend to act) like they know more than they do. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my time in “the Real World” (as people back in college continually reminded me I was not a part of yet), it’s that reality is messy. Certainty is hard to come by, and even when you have it, the path towards executing on that certainty isn’t always clear-cut.

On graduating in 2013, and seeing how I wasn’t interested in becoming one of those know-it-alls who assumed so much, I tasked myself with solving a sort of hard problem:

How do you act with confidence and clarity in a world that is notoriously confusing, complicated, and oftentimes downright scary?

I knew this was a big question, but it was still one I needed to solve for myself. After all, if I wasn’t confident with how I was living my life, if I didn’t have some small sense of how I was choosing to navigate the world, how could I be sure that I was getting anywhere at all?

I’ll spare you some of the details, since it has certainly been a long process. But if I had to put it simply:

Human confidence, happiness, productivity, success, fulfillment… all of these are complicated, but not impossible. And my path, through all manner of jobs (good and bad), opportunities (taken and missed), great days, hard days—this has all been as much a matter of me staying on top of things as it has been about learning what I, myself, truly need to be happy.

Certain things have gotten easier with time. I’m doing a better job of keeping up with chores, making sure my rent is paid, getting back to unread text messages, just like I’ve gotten better at making sure I schedule myself time for rest, making sure I have fun things planned for myself, and making sure I’m able to say no when people ask too much. It’s been a lot of work, but I definitely feel better about it than I did six years ago.

And even when it does feel like work… when I see it from this way, I do still get the sense that it’s the kind of work I’d really like to be doing. What better way to spend my life than continually learning, growing, understanding my impact on others, and coming to understand my greatest potential? The confidence that has grown inside me throughout this process is what gives me the strength to go out and try things I’ve never done before, even though I have no idea what to expect. It’s this confidence that makes me proud to be the person I am.

Here’s to a new year, and new opportunities to grow into who we were meant to be.