My Own Crisis of Confidence

My confidence in John Brownstone – at an all-time high.

My confidence in the people who care about me – high.

My confidence in my friends and family – high.

Don’t get me started on politics. Confidence? What confidence?

But in myself? That’s at an all-time low. And not because anyone has said or done anything to me. The world has not come crashing down around my ears (yet). It’s more that too much has happened at once. If everything on it’s own could be dealt with in a vacuum, it would all be easy. But life isn’t like that. Things hit you all at once, and they all seem small (except the things that aren’t), and they all add up.

So what am I talking about?

Well, there’s the problem of having our identities found out. We talked about it on the podcast but another problem kept me from being able to share the episode here. We’re handling it. Everything will be fine (eventually). But I decided to stay strong instead of having the meltdown I probably deserved. Everything comes home to roost eventually.

I’m still in a weird headspace about what I think of as “my submission” changing drastically. It’s making me crave his dominance and my own acquiescence. But neither of us have time for what we really want (and need). And John Brownstone has the problem of feeling less than dominant because too much has been taken out of his control – never a good feeling for anyone.

Old memories (aka “bad tapes”) of my previous marriage are haunting me. I don’t think John Brownstone will do anything like my ex-husband did. In fact, I know it will be better. But the memories I have of the struggle and stress never went away. I didn’t expect them to, but I didn’t realize how close to the surface they really were.

I’m feeling pressure to take on more work at a time when I don’t have time to seek it out. In a very short time, I’ll have the time I need but my anxious brain is spinning in circles, wringing her hands, and frantic with the need to do this NOW.

And then, right when I thought that was plenty to handle, every website I own (eight in total including John Brownstone’s) started to crash. Server errors hit this site hardest. All the others slowed down to a crawl. It took a few hours (in the middle of hitting a deadline on a massive article) to figure out the problem.

Our cheap web hosting was fine with six basic websites. And then I started getting ideas and adding websites and a community and having plans. That’s all well and good, but it never occurred to me that we’d need a better server to handle what we were doing. My limited understanding of servers is that this is where the websites live, and under the old plan, we shared that space with who knows how many other websites. Once I started adding sites, we began to use way too many resources for the space we were allotted and everything crashed. 

The fixes I could do to get the sites up again (although with really slow loading times) accidentally screwed up the podcast feeds for about a day. I was able to fix that, too.

See? Everything is/was fixable. My impatient babygirl AND businesswoman self wants the server change to be done now, but in the interest of our own sanity, it’s going slowly. But it’s being done correctly. Because this isn’t something I want to fuck up (again).

Like I said at the top, in a vacuum, each problem on it’s own can be handled almost easily. You figure out the solution, implement a plan, and move forward. That’s my preferred method.

Instead…chaos. Not on the outside. On the outside, I communicated with people on social media and by email, apologizing for the problems and promising a fix. On the outside, John Brownstone and I continue to talk through our feelings and insecurities, making plans, crossing off items on our to-do list. We’re staying positive, working hard, and looking to the future.

But on the inside? I’m a fucking basketcase. I can barely write the most basic article because there’s something in my head holding me back, making me think I don’t know what I’m doing, that I’ve fucked up so much other stuff, I’ll probably fuck this up too. God, I hate that feeling. I know it’s temporary. I know I need to be kind to myself. I know I need to rest.

I know these things, but that doesn’t make them easy to act on. Instead, I feel an unspoken internal pressure to keep moving forward, to do more, to not be a “slacker” (yes, I recognize the ridiculousness of that, too).

I’m obsessively checking my websites to make sure they load right now knowing they might not in a few minutes. I’ve hesitated to write much here because I hate the idea of someone getting an error message when they click on a link. Instead of saying, “Fuck it” and being a kick-ass chick about it all, I’ve been sidelined with headaches. Stress and tension headaches as painful as any migraine I’ve ever had knocked me out.

And when John Brownstone had to take over for a night because I’d turned myself into a mess who couldn’t keep her eyes open let alone cope with life, I couldn’t stop apologizing. I’m sorry I’m not handling this well. I’m sorry I’m not being a good submissive. I’m sorry you’re working twice as hard to pick up my slack. I’m sorry.

I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve been apologizing in one way or another to different people for days now. And it’s killing my confidence.