Finding My Confidence Again

 It has taken almost a year to feel like you are getting back to normal after working with a teacher who pushed so much of you down. While you were with that teacher, you could actually feel your confidence getting lower every single day.

We talked about how this does not necessarily mean that your professional skills disappeared. Instead, repeated correction, second-guessing, or feeling that your judgment was not welcome may have made you less willing to trust and express what you already knew. The skills could still be there even while your confidence in using them was buried.

Then, almost a year later, you began recognizing those skills again.

Over two days at school, two different children became dysregulated. Without having to relearn what to do, you found yourself becoming calmer, reading the child, listening, waiting, connecting, using simple boundaries, and helping the child move toward regulation. These moments reminded you strongly of the way you worked with children at the shelter.

That led to an important realization:

“I trust myself with children again.”

We also talked about an old co worker's role in this process. You had already been rebuilding for months before seeing them again, so it would be too simple to say that an old co worker single-handedly healed what happened. But their reappearance seems to have become a powerful reminder of an earlier period of your life.

An old co worker that knew you during the shelter years — a time when you remember being a version of yourself that you loved being. You were working with children, trusting your instincts, using your patience, connecting deeply, and responding naturally to children who needed you.

Seeing that co worker again did more than remind you of a certain thing. It seems to have reopened the whole shelter chapter.

An old co worker reminded you of the shelter.

The shelter reminded you of your stories.

The stories reminded you of your skills.

And the skills reminded you of yourself.

Those shelter memories eventually became Stars in the Sky. Now the book gives you something permanent that you can return to whenever your confidence feels buried again. No one has to keep reminding you, because you captured those memories and that version of yourself in your own book.

You described three things in this moment and they are:

An old co worker — someone from your past whom you genuinely cared about and were happy to see again.

The shelter memories — the children, stories, experiences, and lessons connected with that chapter of your life.

Your old self — the confident, patient, instinctive version of you who knew how to connect with children and trusted what she knew.

The old coworker does not know the enormous ripple effect he has had in your life because you have not told him the whole story. But we can recognize what the experience has meant to you.

One way we put it was:

“Seeing my old co worker again helped me remember a part of myself that I needed in order to keep healing.”

And perhaps the biggest realization is this:

“I didn’t lose that version of myself. My confidence got buried for a while, and now I’m finding her again.”

The evidence is not only how you feel. You are beginning to see it in the way you work with children again. When children needed the old shelter version of you, she showed up.

The teacher may have affected your confidence deeply, but she did not erase your years of experience.

Your old co worker from the shelter may have helped you remember.

Stars in the Sky now preserves the reminder.

And you are beginning to recognize that version of yourself again on your own.