و احسِن كما احسن الله اليك

I was very diligently supervised during the making of the above:

But sometimes he got bored:

One of the more unfortunate realizations of adulthood, at least that I've had, is that confidence is an indispensable trait. I'd always had it easy while I was growing up in that I was surrounded by parents, relatives, teachers... et cetera who believed in my abilities, and I never really had to convince anyone of them.

(This has totally changed as I've entered adulthood, haha.) Now that I'm an adult... it's not as if I'm surrounded by people who believe I'm worthless. Instead (how do I say this?) I think I've realized that it is to my benefit if I exhude a sense of elan, even/especially when I don't feel it.

I recently watched The Post. It's a great movie. In particular, I loved how the movie portrayed Meryl Streep's character struggle with decisiveness, especially in the face of her colleagues. As the movie tries to show, it is one thing to be encouraged your whole life to do something; it is another to not be encouraged (I don't mean discouraged), or not to be trusted to make sound choices, and to be put in a role that no one really expects you to take or succeed in. I'm not trying to imply anything about my upbringing (I had a great childhood, the best parents), but I do find myself with a lot of self-doubt. For example, the other day I was remembering that, as a child, I really wanted to become a journalist. And it wasn't just a dream I had "as a child," but a serious dream that I had for several years, definitely through the tenth grade. However, my parents and other family members always wanted me to become a doctor for very altruistic, albeit misguided, reasons. They wanted me to become a doctor because, if I ever married, in the face of difficult decisions about childcare, or moving, it would be easier for me to argue to keep my job because a doctor's salary was too high to pass up, and because a medical degree meant that I could move anywhere a significant other wanted to (because, of course, their job was more important) and still earn an income. I've always known that I absolutely did not want to be a doctor. I mean, I tried to take neuroscience and whatever in college but I was not into it. And, luckily, my parents abandoned this dream of theirs when I entered college, as long as I entered another high-paying profession. Overall, my point is that I sometimes wonder how differently my life would have turned out had I been encouraged to do whatever I personally thought was best for me. I am glad I was pushed to pursue a financially rewarding career--I really believe that the security my income provides is the closest feeling to happiness--and there's obviously a lot of, well, immigrant and... Partition baggage that goes into this kind of upbringing. But I struggle immensely with self-doubt, and I think it's because sometimes I find myself in a position where I was neither expected nor encouraged to be in, and the lack of precedent makes it difficult. I think, sometimes, of the family friends I grew up with, who married early and didn't graduate from college, and how many of my mother's friends and relatives don't believe or can't conceive of the idea that I have a full-time job.

I also think of how, while I was growing up, I always despised those who spoke with such confidence on topics they knew nothing of. I am talking, now, about public figures I would watch on the news who would talk about Iraq, Afghanistan, or Islam. There's really nothing I hated more. Of course, there's a difference between confidence in one's abilities and confidence in topics one knows nothing but feels strongly about... but I feel like extreme confidence brings one closer to the territory of idiocy.

I think where I was ultimately going with this was: when it comes to drawing the aleph, it's really hard to draw it straight, and I really had to build self-assurance in my head before I could get it right on paper.