Wearing Confidence Like A Second Skin
Have you seen people wearing confidence like a second skin? The way they talk, walk, laugh and smile. The air around them exudes charm.
By Jerusa Mentrin
The truth is, you will always care about what others think of you. Let’s be candid about it.
You will spend hours worrying about what to wear for a particular event, and then you will settle on something. For you, it’s chic, sexy, and flattering to your curves. The colour suits your skin tone perfectly. You love how it highlights your eyes and matches with your hair until someone says, “Brown looks good on you, but yellow would have been better. It’s more vibrant; this one is a bit dull.”
You won’t take it as an opinion. Instead, you’ll think of it as slight. Then you will start wearing it as you do clothes. You will now own that you do not look good; in fact, you will always believe nothing makes you look good, just because one person’s opinion rubbed off on you wrongly.
If they had said you are stunning in brown, you would bloom the entire event. For the rest of your life, you’d probably wear brown more. You’d associate it with your lucky color. Yet it’s not about the color or the one who offers compliments. It’s about you! Your self-confidence.
Have you seen people wearing confidence like a second skin? The way they talk, walk, laugh and smile. The air around them exudes charm. It‘s not about them being the prettiest, strongest, well spoken, or wealthiest in the room. They own who they are, and they take pleasure in being themselves. Nothing makes them waver or cower. People’s opinions are like dust to them. They wipe them off.
Confidence is something we all need to discover at some point in our lives. The ability to become confident or feel sexy starts from somewhere deep within you. If you are always chasing validation from other people, it is highly unlikely you will ever have space to accommodate your own skin.
I have always been a fashion enthusiast, and recently, I was following up on Achieng Agutu’s Sports Illustrated runway swimsuit. If you know Achieng, then you know confidence, and her are two peas in a pod. The woman was stunning, strutting the runway in a leopard print bikini. The comment section to her post was filled with both negative and positive criticism.
One comment that stood out for me was, “I agree this is no model material.”
This is one of the most demeaning things someone would have said, and to me, it would haunt me for years. But she owned it. She spun her whole narrative from someone who looked down at a curvy woman, judging her with idiotic standards of conventional beauty.
Her reply, “Omg you’re so right. This isn’t model material, this is SUPERMODEL material. That must be why I keep ending up in magazines, campaigns, and rooms y’all said women like me could never enter. Thank you for correcting me.”
This was an iconic moment for my confidence journey. I call it a journey because there are moments when I falter when my worth feels downplayed, yet I strive to be better and have the level of audacity, sexiness, vivaciousness, and confidence that women like Achieng Agutu possess. From being called not model material to her owning the supermodel title.
Just like the anecdote I shared earlier on color, everything sums up to how much you have to be at peace with yourself internally in order to glow externally. All the self-help books on confidence share the same message if you analyze it thoroughly. They emphasize self-love.
When you are deeply in a committed relationship with yourself. You don’t settle for anything that you do not deserve. You are the candle glow everyone is drawn to. For you to find that switch that makes you the flame that everyone yearns for, your warmth. You have to take caution not to let it burn you. If you are not grounded in confidence as a state you cultivate rather than a skill, you could be prone to the fear of being diminished, sensitivity to rejection, and desire to be seen or affirmed.
We all experience this. At least I know I did. My turning point was when I turned twenty-three this year. As a child, I was confident growing up. Until I met people who said I was too loud, too talkative, either this or that, and then I shrank. I wanted to fit in so badly that I downplayed my potential to not be too much for others.
When I became a teenager, there was a girl who used to make fun of me because I had big lips. It messed up with how I thought of myself. If someone said, “You are pretty.” I would second-guess them in my mind. I would be asking myself what about my huge lips. I didn’t want to take photos, afraid my lips would stand out from the rest of my features.
It took me five years to realize her insecurities were projected on me for her to feel satisfied. Her lips were bigger than mine, but in a million years, I would never make her feel ashamed or bad about how her features were. People get lip fillers to have plump lips to look pretty. We both were blessed with natural ones, yet her own confidence issues were used against me.
After coming to terms with how people’s opinions should never be used as a catalyst for measuring my confidence, I took a step back. I filtered the people I allowed in. Now, if somebody says something negative, I listen and separate myself from it. People’s opinions are simply theirs. Those are their thoughts, feelings portrayed.
When it comes to myself, I remind myself that I should never be against myself. I believe I am my own cheerleader. With gains, I clap so hard for myself; with losses, those are lessons learned. And one important lesson I am learning is that confident people are not immune to criticism or negative emotions. They simply know how to process situations differently. Unlike people who practice active self-sabotage, they notice opinions and decide their weight in their lives if they hold value as a person.
To become sexy, pretty, beautiful, or gorgeous, you need confidence. It comes from within you. Once you avoid comparisons and acknowledge self-love, you will no longer need to outsource your identity from other people’s voices. Yours is more than enough, and you must make sure it is breathing life into you and not finding fault in everything you do.
Jerusa Mentrin is a Kenyan writer whose work explores the intersections of longing, memory, and everyday tenderness. She draws inspiration from fleeting human moments and the depth of inner landscapes, often weaving imagery of nature, silence, and time into her prose and poetry. When she is not writing, she is reflecting on the “what ifs” of life and finding stories in the ordinary.
Thank you, Jerusa, for sharing this piece with Therapy Sessions. I related deeply to your words and found some healing in them; if I did, I am sure someone else has, too.