"Your confidence is back" is trending on TikTok and honestly I've watched about thirty of those videos in the last week, just basking in everyone deciding it's their season to be unafraid. It's a great trend. I mean that. But it got me thinking about confidence differently. Not as a thing that comes back, like a prodigal dog who finally found its way home, but as a thing I had to build from scratch. Mine was never really there in the form people describe. It got constructed, piece by piece, out of very unpromising materials, and the construction took an embarrassingly long time. Maybe someone else's timeline will feel less embarrassing if I describe mine honestly.
Let me start from a specific place, because that's where the useful stuff lives.
I was the girl at the front of the church. Memorized harmonies, enthusiastic in worship, "such a light," in the words of several adults who meant it kindly and whose praise I absorbed completely. That felt like something for a while. It felt like being seen in the good way. But woven through all of that "you're so special" energy was another message, delivered in a thousand small and not-so-small ways: your body is a problem. Your feelings are dangerous if they're the wrong kind. Your job is to be the right kind of girl, modest, quiet in the ways that matter, careful not to create situations where someone might stumble. The stumbling would be your fault.
I've written about purity culture before and I'm not going to do the full analysis again here. But the relevant point for this conversation is what that framework does to confidence specifically. And what it does is: it makes confidence in yourself synonymous with danger. If you know you're good at something and you show it, that's pride. If you know you're attractive and you own it, that's vanity or a stumbling block. If you trust your own instincts about what you want and who you are, you might be trusting yourself over God. Confidence is preemptively pathologized. And it gets into your wiring young enough that you can spend years after leaving the system still feeling like there's something fundamentally suspicious about trusting yourself.
What Stage Did
The first time I played a full set to a real audience (not a church performance where I was a cog in someone else's service, but my own songs, my own words, a bar stage with a mic stand that was slightly too tall and a monitor that kept buzzing) I was terrified. Not the exciting kind of terrified. The kind where your brain is running a continuous loop of "this was a mistake" and your hands are doing the guitar parts separately from the rest of you, like they've defected from the larger crisis and decided to just do their job.
Something happened in the second song. It doesn't happen every time, I'm not going to oversell this as a cinematic breakthrough, but that night something shifted. Midway through the bridge of the second song, I looked up from the fretboard (which I'd been staring at like it owed me money) and I saw a person in the third row who had put their drink down and was just watching. Fully watching. Something in their face said: I'm here, I'm in this with you.
That moment gave me something I can only describe as: permission. Not from the audience person (they weren't giving me anything consciously). But something in the experience of being witnessed, in the genuine way rather than the church-performance way, generated a small internal click. You can be here. You can take up this much space. This is actually allowed.
It's not a permanent state, that click. I have to earn it again more or less every time I perform. But the fact that it happened at all, the fact that it was possible, cracked a door that had been sealed a long time.
Confidence as Practice, Not Personality
Here's the thing that has done more for me than any amount of "believe in yourself" messaging: understanding that confidence is a skill, not a trait. Not a personality characteristic you either have or don't. Not something that confident people are born with while the rest of us stand on the wrong side of the genetic lottery. A practice. A set of behaviors that, done repeatedly over time, generate the experience we call confidence as a byproduct.
This reframe is borrowed from behavioral psychology and it's been in self-help discourse forever, but it hit me differently when I actually applied it instead of just reading about it. The behaviors that generate confidence are: taking action before you feel ready, tolerating the discomfort of being seen when you're uncertain, making decisions and standing behind them even when they're imperfect, and doing all of this repeatedly until you have a track record (even a small one) that your brain can reference the next time the doubt shows up.
For me, the actions were specific: playing open mics before my songs were finished. Posting music online before I thought it was good enough. Saying "I'm a musician" to people who asked what I did, even in the years when that felt like a lie or a bet I hadn't yet won. Each of these things felt wrong in the moment, premature, presumptuous, risky. And then I did them anyway, repeatedly, and slowly the gap between the action and the feeling started to close.
Note: I'm not saying "fake it till you make it," which I find insulting as a concept. I'm saying do the thing before the feeling arrives, because the feeling is downstream of the action, not upstream. The feeling of confidence doesn't precede the behavior. It follows it. Often by quite a long lag. But it comes.
What Purity Culture Took and What I Rebuilt
I want to be specific about the form the damage took, because I think it's useful. Not to be dramatic about it, but because naming a thing precisely gives you something to actually push against.
What purity culture took from my confidence wasn't, in the end, my body confidence or my sexual confidence specifically (though those were affected). It was deeper. It took my trust in my own judgment. The framework I grew up in trained me to second-guess my instincts on the grounds that my instincts were potentially led by sin, by the flesh, by the world. My gut feelings were suspect. My desires were suspect. My read on situations was suspect. God's will was the override, and since God's will was interpreted by authorities (scripture, pastors, parents, tradition), I was trained to defer to external interpretation over internal experience.
That's confidence damage at the root. You can't be confident in your actions when you don't trust that your reasons for taking them are valid. Every choice becomes a potential theological error.
What I rebuilt it on: evidence. My own record. The fact that I made decisions, left the church, kept making music when it wasn't working, came out, made the album, and then got to watch those decisions play out in real time and evaluate them not through someone else's interpretive framework but through my own. HEATHEN HYMNS is out. People are finding themselves in it. That's data. I was right about something. I can trust that I was right about something. And from there, slowly, the trust extends.
The Confidence That Actually Showed Up
The version of confidence I have now is not the loud unshakeable kind you see in the TikTok "confidence is back" trend. It's quieter and stranger. It's mostly: I've been here before, I've been afraid before, I've done the thing while afraid before, and I survived it and sometimes it was actually good. That's it. That's the whole thing.
It doesn't mean I'm not nervous before I release something. I was terrified when HEATHEN HYMNS went out. That vulnerable feeling of having made something real and put it in the world where people can have opinions about it, that doesn't fully go away. But there's a voice underneath the fear now that says: you built this, you know why you made every choice, whatever happens next you showed up. That voice is new, and it's mine, and I would never trade it for a louder more performative version.
If your confidence took the scenic route too (if it didn't arrive on schedule, if it required more reconstruction than anyone told you it would) that's not a character flaw. That's just a longer journey. You're building yours out of better materials than people who had it handed to them unearned. That might matter, eventually. Keep going.
What I'd Say to Someone Just Starting
Since HEATHEN HYMNS came out I've been hearing from a lot of people who are in the early stages of leaving frameworks (religious, cultural, relational) that taught them their own instincts were not to be trusted. They're asking versions of: how do I start rebuilding when the foundation got taken out? And I don't want to give some glib answer, because it's a real question and deserves a real attempt.
Start small and start physical. The mind can argue, but the body just does. Take one small action that feels slightly presumptuous. Tell one person about the thing you're working on, show up to one open mic, make the account and post the first thing. Not because the action itself changes everything. Because the experience of having done it, having survived it, being on the other side of it, that's data your brain can actually use. "I thought this would be catastrophic and it wasn't" is the first brick in every rebuilt foundation.
Find people who have already done what you're trying to do. Not to copy them but to know it's possible. Confidence is partially social, we calibrate what's safe and achievable partly based on what we see other people doing. If everyone you know is still inside the framework you're leaving, your brain will keep asking whether you're crazy for leaving. You need exposure to people who left and are okay. They exist. They're online. They're at the weird little venues and the community spaces and the comment sections of the honest content. Find them.
And finally: be patient with the timeline. I did not have real confidence until I had real evidence, and real evidence took years of showing up to build. that's not a failure of technique. That's just the nature of evidence-based self-trust. It compounds. Every kept commitment, every survived risk, every moment you showed up when you didn't feel like it. It accumulates, quietly, and one day you look around and realize the foundation is solid enough to build on. You'll know it when you feel it. It doesn't announce itself. It's just suddenly there.