Doubt your way to belief in your potential.

Before I found a job early on in my second unemployment experience, I started searching for these quotes and using them to define a one-word prompt to begin writing these posts. I needed to be creating something, putting some energy into the world that was not cover letters or re-optimized resumes.

I was riddled with doubt and needed to imagine a more idealistic world where collective hope and kindness and curiosity ruled.

When I started writing these posts, I promised myself I would write them for a year. I believe they are important and they bring me peace of mind. These are my small protests.

I want to see more hope and love and progress to believe in this world and the future of my girls. I want to spend more time thinking about a world that would feel good leaving to my daughters so they may actually inhabit that world.

If anything comes from these posts, at least my daughters will have some fairy tales of possibility.

But the doubt is real. And my process is experiencing a shake up. I'm grinding through this work in off-hours now, and have been less consistent. The quality of the work is suffering because I'm not focused on the prep work. And all of this is okay. I've got a job and I'm very excited about the role and the people are incredible and I am being challenged from the first few steps. I couldn't ask for a better opportunity and I'm extremely grateful for this experience. But I'm not going to lie, the doubt is real here as well.

“Doubt becomes the energy of belief.”

• Nick Cave, Faith, Hope & Carnage

So I guess what I'm trying to get at is this: doubt is natural and necessary. It isn't fun and it feels overwhelming, but the only way out is through, right, Frost?

Or as Cave says in the prompt quote, doubt energizes belief and makes it possible to believe.

So if you are stuck, if you are riddled with doubt, understand the nervous energy you feel is the energy of belief. Somewhere down the line, you already believe in yourself. Trust yourself and your ability to get there, to transform the energy of doubt into an unwavering belief in your ability to grind and overcome this low and thrive.

Practice this process of transforming doubt into belief. Go through the motions if you must, but understand that if doubt were not present, belief wouldn’t be either.