I've reached four years at Martiancraft today, which means it's almost five years as a full-time remote designer. Thinking back, I can't forget the moment when I left last job and stared into the skies at Bryant Park, wondering...what will I do now?

In the past four years, I've been a turtle. ? I shrunk my head into the shell and focused on design. I breathed, lived, and worked on projects in hopes that would fill me with purpose. I searched only to do what made me happy. I challenged myself to improve every day because it was the only thing that made sense.

Somehow along this journey, I've lost my voice. I'm no longer confident in sharing thoughts because I don't see the value in myself. The more I thought about doing something, the more I realized that I might not be able to do it well. I was never afraid in the past. I am now. What happened to me?

The more I want to share a bit of writing, the more I think people will be picking apart the grammar, sentence structure, or lack of narrative. The more people pay more attention to what I said, the more I felt the burden of making it bulletproof. Every idea that I wasn't a hundred percent certain I've hidden it away. Pretending to be an expert when I can only call myself a fraud.

I've lost confidence in myself through these years. When adobe first asked me to attend a UX/UI live back in September, all I thought was... Why me? What do I have to offer that people don't know already? No matter what type of great feedback I got, I couldn't accept them in my heart. After being asked back again this past January, something in me changed.

I do have something to offer. I can teach people things that they don't know.

Most of the time, I have reasonings for everything that I do. If I don't, I'm authentic about it. I don't strive for perfection, I don't expect people to think I have a mind-blowing thesis. I make mistakes. Thoughts I have today, maybe they are rebuttaled and it's completely different tomorrow. It's always an open dialog, I'm endlessly searching for viewpoints, stories, and opinions that people have to understand deeper.

I am not sure what's the right approach to share these fleeting and transient thoughts. Haven't we all looked back at the things we've done in the past and go "EWW?" How scary it is to face your own past and see what an idiot you were.

I guess I'm scared of myself and of my own inevitability to be stupid.

I've come to terms that I will hope to revive my long lost confidence by sharing my views in efforts to overcome these self-conscious negativity. I hope I can look back and see this as personal growth as a person for myself. Sometimes, all it takes is only one person to believe in you and one moment to point out the things you missed and how you can be that much better.