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It’s All Been a Lie. Confident People? It’s All an Act! Who Knew?

Susan Kelley
3 min readDec 16, 2021

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Photo by Jansen Yang on Unsplash

There are these people. You know the ones. They totally come off as having their shit together. I hate those people.

There was this one girl, I have known her since elementary school, and it’s like so much of what she did was awesome. She was great at gym, always getting picked first for teams, and her hair was good. She was so great at doing speed times tables, it was astonishing. And even in girl scouts, her mom was one of the volunteer leaders and so meetings were at her house every Tuesday night, and her mom seemed funny and cool. And her parents were divorced which, in the seventies seemed so avant-garde and edgy.

In college, I met another girl whose posture and attitude were similar. She was not an athlete, she was an actress. She wore her collars starched and upright, and the bangles that dripped from her wrists seemed to announce her arrival. We were at a Western Pennsylvania college best known as a teachers’ school, but she looked as though she had just stepped off a dock at Cape Cod. Dreamy.

So what was it about these people that made them so confident?

It took me until well into adulthood (I’m 51 now) to recognize the answer.

Probably nothing.

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Susan Kelley
Susan Kelley

Written by Susan Kelley

Susan is a runner, a mom of 3 grown children, and an avid traveler. She writes about humans, and wrote a book about false accusations of sexual assault.

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