Loudly, Jenna

I’ve always considered myself a confident person.

Not in an I’m better than you kind of way. More in an I actually really like being me kind of way. And I think I owe a lot of that to the people who raised me.

My mom believes in me with every fiber of her being. My dad does too, and growing up, so did my brother. They all played different roles in building the confidence I have today.

But Teresa—my mom—set the standard.

Growing up, I thought that woman was just confident as hell.
Then I became an adult, and she started letting her guard down. She let me see some of her insecurities and the things she’d struggled with quietly all those years.

And let me tell you, it flabbered my gasted.
Because her? The woman who taught me to walk into a room like I belonged there? The woman whose confidence helped create mine? Insecure?

It made me realize something I don’t think I fully understood before:
Confident women can be insecure women, too.

I know I’m pretty. There, I said it. I’m a brown-haired, brown-eyed girlie, and I genuinely like my natural face. I don’t feel like I need makeup to make myself pretty. I think I’m funny. I’m a decent cook. I’m reasonably intelligent—although I’m absolutely still using my fingers for simple math, so let’s manage expectations here.

There are plenty of things about myself that I genuinely like.
There are also things I can pick apart in approximately three seconds.
My upper arms? Hate them. My double chin? Don’t even get me started.
And right now, in this particular season of my life, my relationship with my body is probably more complicated than it’s ever been.

I gained 65 pounds during pregnancy. I’m currently navigating postpartum about 40 pounds heavier than I was before getting pregnant, and some days I look in the mirror and genuinely don’t recognize the woman looking back at me.
That’s hard for me to admit.

Because I’m Jenna.

I’m the confident one.

Except confidence doesn’t magically make insecurity disappear.
I’m incredibly grateful for my body. It grew my daughter. It brought her into this world. And right now, it’s still the vessel creating the fuel that helps her grow.

I can know all of that. I can be amazed by what my body has done.
And I can still struggle with what I see in the mirror.

Both things can be true.
Maybe that’s the part of confidence we don’t talk about enough.

There was a time when my loudness probably helped hide a lot of those contradictions. From about 12 to 25, loud was absolutely armor.
I was going through things that a lot of people around me knew nothing about.

Being funny, rowdy, obnoxious, and the big personality in the room gave me somewhere to hide. Then I got older. I went to therapy—highly recommend, by the way—and started understanding myself differently. I figured out why I needed to be so loud. And eventually, I realized I didn’t need the armor anymore.

I’m still loud. Obviously. Have you seen the name of this blog?
But it’s a different kind of loud now. It’s not please don’t look closely enough to see what’s underneath. It’s this is who I am, and I’m not making myself smaller for you. Because I used to do that too.

I’ve been told that people don’t actually like me—that they’re only nice to me because I intimidate them. That one stuck. For a while, comments like that could make me question myself. Maybe my confidence was too much. Maybe I needed to soften it, quiet it, make myself a little more digestible.

I don’t do that anymore.

And now I have an even bigger reason not to.
My daughter.

I want her to grow up knowing that society doesn’t get to decide whether she’s beautiful. She does. I want her to talk herself up. I want her to know her strengths without immediately following them with a joke to make everybody else comfortable. I want her to understand that loving herself will always serve her better than spending her life hating things she can’t change in seconds.
And maybe one day she’ll grow up and discover that her mom had insecurities too.

Maybe it’ll flabber her gasted.
I hope it does.

Because that will mean she grew up seeing a mother who chose confidence even when she didn’t feel completely confident.

My partner sees the other version of me. He sees the insecurities most people probably wouldn’t believe I have, and when he notices them creeping in, he does everything he can to hype me back up. But I’m also learning how to do that for myself.

Because confidence isn’t looking in the mirror every morning and thinking you’re the hottest bitch who ever lived. It isn’t never questioning yourself.
It isn’t loving every inch of your body every second of every day.

Maybe confidence is being able to say:
I’m struggling with myself right now, but I’m still on my own side.

At 31, that’s where I am.
I’m navigating a body I don’t completely recognize, motherhood I’m still learning, and a version of myself I’ve never had to be before.

And when 50-year-old Jenna looks back at this woman, I don’t think she’s going to criticize her arms. I don’t think she’s going to care about the double chin.
I think she’s going to look at her with admiration.

Because even when 31-year-old Jenna thought she was struggling, she was doing her best.

She was becoming a mother. She was feeding her baby. She was learning herself all over again. And she kept showing up.

Maybe someday I’ll look back and realize I was a hell of a lot stronger—and more beautiful—than I gave myself credit for.

For now, I’m working on believing her.

With love & a little chaos,

Jenna