Neuroqueering confidence

Confidence is very gendered. Having been socialized as male, I was expected to be confident. I was expected to take the leading role in dating, to assert myself—essentially, to push against my anxiety and feelings of shyness and awkwardness to get what I want. If I didn’t get what I wanted, it was my fault: I didn’t try hard enough, I wasn’t assertive enough, I should’ve been more confident.

The irony of confidence is that it has the facade of being direct and outspoken—after all, isn’t that what confidence is about?—but in reality, confidence can hide a lot. If you have anxieties and fears, you need to set them aside, push through them. Asking for accommodations for your feelings that prevent you from being confident gives them too much weight. You have to “fake it till you make it.” Rather than address your anxieties head on, you have to ignore them till they’re overshadowed by confidence.

But does this actually happen? If it does, is it a universal experience? And more importantly, is it something that needs to happen? Do people need to be confident? Is confidence a prerequisite to finding love, to building a career, to being happy? Is confidence the determiner of our worthiness?

As a neurodivergent person, my experience of confidence is as a mask. I can pretend to play a leading role, but it’s not something I can internalize. To tell me to fake it till I make it is to tell me to fake being neurotypical till I make it. It’s a form of neuronormativity, and is ultimately derived from the same framework as the abusive applied behaviour analysis. It’s based on the premise that neurodivergent people can—and should—adapt themselves towards neurotypicality, and that that is the only way we are deemed worthy of functioning in society and living our best lives. (Would they even be our best lives? After being shaped to fit into the mold, would they even be our lives?)

Once I started identifying as nonbinary, I’ve felt a path opening up for me to let go of the need to put on a pretence of confidence. It’s become easier for me to be myself in all my awkwardness, my shyness, my hesitations. I no longer feel that I need to exude assertiveness. I no longer feel the pressure to take on the leading role, to initiate conversations, to always push myself out of my comfort zone to be more social and more socially confident. And this has been allowing me to feel more grounded—to feel that I can exist in this world, not an idealized, confident, neurotypical, “manly”, modified replica of me.

This has also allowed me to think critically of the very concept of confidence, and to deconstruct it. What I want to—and strive to—build in the space that deconstructing confidence leaves behind is a framework of comfort. This framework creates space for accommodation. If I don’t feel comfortable doing something, I ask myself why that is. If I don’t feel comfortable talking in a certain social environment, I try to figure out what’s impeding my comfort: maybe it’s too noisy, maybe I’m tired, maybe I’m hungry. All of these are factors that tend to affect my ability to socialize. Then I ask myself if I can alleviate the cause: maybe I need to get something to eat. Or I can just accept the situation as it is, especially if it’s out of my control (such as if it’s too noisy), and allow myself to exist in my current headspace without judging myself for it.

The framework of comfort allows me to think about my needs to find long-term solutions. Maybe I need to use earplugs to reduce my perception of noise in noisy environments. Maybe I need to avoid noisy environments altogether and find quieter environments where I can socialize. Maybe I can find a balance between the two and adjust my expectations of how my experience is going to be depending on the social situation.

In interpersonal connections, the framework of comfort allows me to experience the dynamic like a dance in which we’re in harmony with each other, where we build comfort with each other. It allows me to be mindful of what I’m comfortable doing at the moment, and what I’m not comfortable doing—it allows me to hold my boundaries, rather than feeling that I need to push against them and pull them down for the sake of “confidence”.

Unlike performative confidence, the framework of comfort doesn’t require hiding your anxieties. I can share my anxieties and fears that I feel comfortable and safe sharing in the dynamic. I can be direct in my communication, which aligns with my being as a neurodivergent person. This, in turn, allows me to ask for accommodations, which augments my feeling of comfort and safety, creating a positive feedback loop that allows me to unmask, to feel seen and accepted.

By allowing me to unmask, the framework of comfort also allows me to stop performing masculinity. I no longer anxiously feel that I need to constantly push myself out of my comfort zone, to socialize more, to be more outgoing. I can accept my emotional state at the moment. If I’m feeling awkward, I can allow myself to feel awkward. I’m the only one who decides when to push against the awkwardness. There’s no social force looming over me pressuring me to act in a certain way to prove myself.

The framework of comfort itself creates comfort. It peels off the performativity of confidence, of masculinity, a facade that has been put on me by society, a heavy facade that I have been carrying on me, a facade so heavy that it has created a layer of anxiety on top of it. The framework of comfort allows me to be comfortable in my being, to be kind to myself. It allows me to breathe, to be free. It allows me to just be.