i gained freedom. i lost a village

i don't actually want to be confident all the time. there, i said it. everyone seems to want confidence these days. confident women. confident communication. confident boundaries. confident body language. confident decisions. walk into the room like you belong there. speak up. don't let anyone walk all over you. know your worth. and i understand all of it. i've learned how important it is to be able to speak for yourself. because if you don't, there will always be someone happy to speak for you. but sometimes i miss not having to be so damn alert. confidence takes effort. you have to know when to push back, when to negotiate, when to say no, when someone is trying to take advantage of you. you have to be able to explain yourself clearly and stand behind what you said. and if you're not confident, people can sometimes sense it. suddenly you're easier to dismiss. easier to put in a box. easier to underestimate. i don't want to live like that. but i also don't want to spend my entire life performing confidence just to make sure people treat me fairly.

maybe this is something i only understand because of where i came from. when i left the community i grew up in, i gained an enormous amount of freedom. suddenly there were so many things i could try, see, wear, say and become. the world opened up in ways i hadn't known were possible. but there was another side to that freedom that nobody really talks about. i lost a village. inside the community, there was a network of people who simply knew each other. if your car broke down, there was probably someone who knew how to fix it. if you travelled to another city, there might be a congregation there where you already knew someone. if you needed somewhere to sleep, there was often a connection. if something went wrong, you didn't necessarily have to figure everything out alone. there was a built-in network of people who would help because you belonged to the same community. i don't miss everything about that world. there are things i would never choose again. but i do miss that part. i miss the simplicity of knowing that someone would probably answer the phone. and maybe that's one of the strangest things about leaving a very close community: you can be happier, freer and more yourself, and still grieve something you don't want back. the two things don't cancel each other out.

the world outside gave me possibilities, but it also gave me responsibility. nobody was going to hand me a community anymore. i had to find my own friends. i had to figure out who i could trust. i had to learn how to speak up. i had to become comfortable saying “no, that's not okay” without waiting for someone else to back me up. i had to learn that not everyone has good intentions, and that sometimes people will absolutely take advantage of you if you let them. there is a darker side to freedom that i don't think we talk about enough: when you are free to choose your own life, you are also responsible for protecting it. you have to build your own safety net. you have to decide who gets access to you. you have to find your people instead of simply being born into them. and maybe that is why confidence has always felt slightly complicated to me. i don't want confidence because i want to be the loudest person in the room. i want enough of it to be able to remain myself when someone else is trying to make me smaller. i want to be able to speak when something is wrong, and then go home without spending the next three days wondering whether i should have said it differently. i want to be free without becoming hard. i want to be independent without pretending i don't need anyone. i want to build a life where people choose each other, not because they have to, but because they want to. maybe that's the part i'm still learning. i gained freedom. i gained choices. i gained a life that feels like mine. but i lost a village along the way. and sometimes i think the real challenge isn't learning how to live without one. maybe it's learning how to build a new one.