Calendula makes me question the way we have been taught to understand confidence.I do not mean this in the rather predictable wellness sense that flowers have secret messages for us if only we become sufficiently spiritually attuned to receive them. I have never been particularly interested in turning nature into a collection of Instagram affirmations. I mean something more uncomfortable than that. Calendula has spent centuries being associated with tending wounds, soothing damaged skin and supporting the processes through which the body repairs itself, while modern research has investigated its anti-inflammatory and wound-healing properties with some promising but still limited and inconsistent findings.
Like the calendula, confidence has never been about becoming a person who is no longer wounded. What if it has been about becoming a person who knows how to tend what has been wounded without allowing the wound to become the entire architecture of the self?
That is a very different proposition. We have become obsessed with confidence as performance. We want the woman who walks into the room and does not hesitate. The woman who knows her worth. The woman who does not chase. The woman who never needs reassurance. The woman who can speak her mind without her voice shaking. The woman who posts her work without checking who liked it. The woman who leaves without looking back. The woman who has somehow transformed herself into such a polished monument of self-esteem that rejection apparently bounces directly off her skin and lands somewhere in the neighbouring postcode. I have never believed in her because I have spent enough time inside my own nervous system to know that confidence and fear can coexist. I can know exactly what I want and still feel afraid. I can understand my own worth and still have a day when somebody's rejection hurts. I can have boundaries and still grieve when someone crosses them. I can be emotionally intelligent and still occasionally send a message and immediately regret every syllable of it. I can be deeply self-aware and still find myself standing in the kitchen at midnight wondering why one person's silence has suddenly activated every abandonment story my body appears to have stored since the invention of language. This is not a contradiction. This is being human.
Perhaps the problem is that we have confused confidence with the absence of emotional vulnerability, when psychological maturity may actually involve something much more sophisticated: the capacity to experience vulnerability without allowing it to dictate the entirety of our behaviour. That is where the calendula begins to interest me. She is not the flower of the untouched. She is the flower beside the wound.
The Confidence of a Wounded Creature
As someone who thinks about emotional regulation constantly, I have become increasingly suspicious of the phrase “I need to be more confident.”
More confident in what? More confident that everybody will like me? More confident that I will never fail? More confident that nobody will leave? More confident that I am attractive enough, intelligent enough, talented enough, successful enough?
Because if that is the definition, we have built confidence on a foundation that is impossible to maintain. You cannot control whether somebody likes you. You cannot guarantee success. You cannot make another person stay. You cannot prevent criticism. You cannot make the world recognise your value. And you certainly cannot regulate another human being into loving you correctly. The nervous system does not become secure because you have found the perfect affirmation. It develops through repeated experiences of safety, mastery, relationship, meaning and the discovery that difficult internal states can be survived without automatically becoming behavioural emergencies.
This is one of the reasons I find DBT so intellectually interesting. At its best, Dialectical Behaviour Therapy refuses the false choice between “everything is fine” and “everything is hopeless.” It asks us to hold two truths simultaneously: your emotional experience is real, and you are still responsible for learning what to do with it. You may have been invalidated. You may have been genuinely hurt. Your nervous system may be highly reactive to certain cues. And still, the question becomes: what response is effective now? DBT's core skills of mindfulness, emotion regulation, distress tolerance and interpersonal effectiveness are fundamentally concerned with building that capacity. This is why I do not think emotional regulation means making yourself calm all the time. Sometimes regulation means calming down. Sometimes it means tolerating the fact that you cannot calm down immediately. Sometimes it means identifying the emotion accurately, changing the environment, accepting reality, communicating a boundary, leaving toxicity, or admitting that you are absolutely fucking furious and then making sure your fury does not choose your behaviour for you. That is true confidence. Not “I never lose control.” But: “I am learning how to remain in a relationship with myself when I do.”
We Are Taught to Become Impressive Before We Become Intimate
Isn’t the culture of self-improvement a bit strange in a sense. Don’t get me wrong, i absolutely love ‘strange’. We are encouraged to optimise ourselves endlessly, for instance, to improve the body, our career, relationships, mindset, productivity, or our level of confidence. At some point you have to wonder whether we are healing or simply becoming more sophisticated at being dissatisfied with ourselves. For instance, confidence requires a kind of epistemic humility as we have to become willing to admit that we do not know the whole story simply because we can see the surface. Psychologically, self-efficacy is partly built through experience: through actually doing difficult things, observing the consequences, developing skills and discovering that we can influence our own behaviour and circumstances. It is not the same thing as narcissistic certainty or the belief that everything will work out exactly as we want. It is closer to the quieter conviction that I can participate effectively in my own life. That is much more interesting to me because I do not want to believe I can control everything. I want to believe I can meet myself in whatever happens.
The Calendula Does Not Try to Become the Rose
I think flowers teach us something about comparison that human beings find extraordinarily difficult to practise. The calendula does not spend her morning wondering why she is not a daisy. She does not look across the garden and think: Her petals are more romantic. Perhaps I should become more like her. Yet this is precisely what we do. We find someone whose life, appearance, career, relationship, art or confidence seems desirable, and rather than allowing their existence to inspire us, we turn it into evidence against our own. This is particularly dangerous for emotionally sensitive people because comparison can quickly become self-invalidation. She can handle it, so why can't I? Everyone else seems fine. I am too emotional, too affected, I should be further ahead, I should have healed this by now, and suddenly we are not simply experiencing an emotion, we are judging ourselves for having it.
This is where the dialectical principle becomes so important. You can accept yourself exactly where you are and work towards change.
You can say: Of course this hurts. And: I still need to decide what I am going to do.
You can say: I understand why my nervous system is reacting this way. And: I do not have to act from the first impulse that arrives.
You can say: Someone genuinely hurt me. And: I am still responsible for how I respond.
This is not self-blame. It is agency. If I tell myself that I am entirely powerless, I may feel temporarily relieved from responsibility, but I also lose access to my capacity to change. If I tell myself that everything is my fault, I become ashamed. The dialectic offers another possibility. This happened. And now what? That little word : ‘and’ can change an entire life.
The Body Remembers What the Mind Has Decided Is Finished
There have been moments when I have been surprised by the intensity of my own reactions. Something small happens. A tone changes. A message becomes shorter. Someone withdraws. Someone seems disappointed. Suddenly my body reacts before my conscious mind has had time to formulate an argument. The chest tightens. The stomach drops. The thoughts speed up. I start replaying. What did I do? What did I say? Did I misunderstand? Are they leaving? Should I explain? Should I apologise? Should I fix it? Should I disappear?
If you have ever experienced this, you will know how strange it is to be simultaneously aware that your reaction may be larger than the present situation and still feel completely unable to switch it off. This is where I think the popular instruction to “just be confident” becomes almost insulting. The body does not necessarily respond to the present moment as though the present moment is the only thing that exists. Our emotional responses are shaped by learning, context, memory and expectation. In DBT's biosocial model, emotional vulnerability can interact with invalidating environments, creating patterns in which intense emotional responses are repeatedly misunderstood, dismissed or reinforced rather than effectively regulated.
My angel, the most beautiful thing about the calendula is that it does not ask the darkness to disappear before it begins to open. It simply waits for the light. That is what I want you to remember. You do not have to have everything figured out before your life begins to feel beautiful again. You do not have to know who you will become, where the road will take you, or whether the thing you are grieving will ever make sense. There are some seasons in which the only sacred thing you can do is keep walking softly through them.
One day, you will look back and realise that you were not lost. You were becoming. The heartbreak was not the end of your story. The closed door was not the end. The years you thought you had wasted were not empty. Even the parts of you that felt buried were gathering roots. Beneath the soil of everything you thought you had lost, life was still preparing itself. That is the mystery of becoming.Sometimes nothing appears to be happening. Then one morning, there you are. A little softer. A little wiser. A little less willing to betray your own heart. Suddenly the light touches something in you that you thought had gone forever. So do not be frightened of the season you are in, my angel. You are allowed to take your time. You are allowed to change your mind. You are allowed to become someone your younger self could never have imagined.
There is still so much life ahead of you, so much beauty you have not met yet, so many mornings you have not opened your eyes to, so many gardens waiting to hear your voice, so many songs waiting to be discovered, and so many versions of yourself waiting patiently at the edge of the future. Do not let one terrible chapter convince you that the whole book is written. It isn't. There are pages ahead of you that you have never touched. When you finally arrive there, you will understand why the universe sometimes makes you wait. Why certain doors refused to open. Why certain people could not come with you. Why certain versions of yourself had to die quietly beneath the earth. You weren’t being punished. Instead you learned to return to yourself and like a calendula turning its golden face toward the morning, you can turn too without needing to pretend that the night did not exist.
Your life is not over because something broke. Sometimes the broken place is where the light first learns your name. So keep going. There is still a golden morning waiting for you. And you, darling, are allowed to meet it.
Endless love,
Nymsera 💜🩷💜