How am I really to know who is the most confident person I’ve ever known? Someone might feign confidence, and appear super confident, but secretly feel insecure and just not talk about it, because perhaps they are insecure about the insecurity itself.

However, I know who is the most confident-seeming person I’ve ever met. I met her my first semester at my first college, and gravitated toward her, because she had what the kids these days call “main character energy.” She was not only very outspoken, fearless, funny, and confident (making her relatively easy for my AvPD to be around, compared to other people), but also on the “quirky/artsy” side, as was I; and this was at a snooty little private university that was a veritable Sahara Desert, in terms of quirkiness/artsyness. So I, who have always been insecure, was trying hard to find some other weirdish people to associate with.

There’s this false stereotype about confidence that it makes you cocky, that you go around like you’re God’s gift to humanity and think everyone should bow to you. Similarly, there’s a false stereotype about humility, that it makes you think of yourself as a piece of shit and makes you too timid to ever speak up. In fact, confidence and humility can coexist beautifully, which is what this girl showed me just by being herself.

By humble, I mean that she was totally aware of who she was, and she owned it. She was a nerd, and a chubby girl (and not even trying to change that; she ate whatever she liked, as if she were totally immune to diet culture; she would just openly describe herself as “fat” and not even bat an eye or expect someone to coddle or reassure her about it), who liked some gross foods (like, the processed deli meat slices with the chunks of American cheese mixed right into the meat – to my absolute horror, she used to keep this in the mini-fridge in our suite, when we were suite-mates sophomore year, without even concealing it in a plastic grocery bag or anything, the way I would do with shame-foods), and had some lowbrow hobbies (like video gaming, which she would do in the common room of our suite with the blinds pulled down, even on a beautiful sunny fall day when clearly a morally-upright person was obligated to be outside in nature, exercising); but was she ashamed of any of these? Not in the slightest. She socialized. She shared herself with people. She expressed emotions with ease, from anger/irritation to sadness to delight to anything in between. She could enjoy movies and stories about thin, beautiful characters without being devastated that she was not thinner or more beautiful than them. She spoke to other, thinner people like they were her equals. She wasn’t afraid of them.

It was a beautiful, fascinating, and, to me at the time, horrible thing to behold.

I was, in those days, in the thick of my ED, restricting heavily, underweight, and super stressed (as I always have been, and continue to be, 15 years later) about not being good enough. So watching this girl be so comfortable in her own skin made me positively sick: sick because how dare anyone be okay with being fat and nerdy! Those were cardinal sins! And sick with envy, because why couldn’t I ever be so comfortable with myself? How did she do it? What was her secret?

In the early days, freshman year, my socially awkward ass glommed right onto her, because her big personality and the way she could carry a conversation made her easy to be around. (Also, tbh, my ED was always appeased when it was in the company of people who were bigger than myself; so she made me comfortable on several levels.) I followed her around; I became friends with some of the people she was friends with. Sophomore year, she and another girl, the third member of what I thought of as our little trio, invited me to join them in sharing a suite with a fourth girl (who was around so little that I barely remember her). It sounded like a good arrangement. I had my own bedroom, as did the mystery girl, while my two friends, who were always closer to each other than I was to either of them, shared a bedroom; and we all shared a common room with a kitchenette and bathroom. It should have been a great year!

But I was really sick that year. And when sick, I shut down and shut people out. My suitemates had brought a large TV to set up in the common room, which pissed me off, because obviously worthy, deserving people only read great literature or made art for fun; only fat losers would need a big TV, and I didn’t want to be a fat loser; how dare they be so shameless about it! And it pissed me off even more when they would invite a whole crowd of annoying friends (actually, this was a great group of really cool individuals: the campus weirdos, i.e. pretty much the only eight to ten kids on campus who weren’t involved in Greek Life; there was this little inherited joke, that we few were members of the elite “ΓΔΙ”, Gamma Delta Iota, i.e. “G**damn Independent,” lol; in the very early days, before I sank so deeply into my sickness and horribleness, I actually enjoyed and was proud to belong to this crowd of friends) over to the common area late into the night to play noisy video games on this stupid TV, such as Rock Band. Only a cardboard-thin wall divided my pillow from that stupid plastic drumset that they’d pound away on late into the night. Be a decent human, I thought bitterly! Learn to play the real drums, if you want to drum something! Losers! And they’d play the same annoying songs over and over! To this day, “Float On” by Modest Mouse gets me triggered AF.

I was just so irritated. I’d get irritated by my suitemates’ sanitary products, disposed of in our shared bathroom trash can. How vile, how bodily, how shameless! How dare they have the nerve to menstruate! Of course, I never voiced any of these hateful thoughts or complained about the noise or the smells or anything. I just cast passive-aggressive stares at them when passing through on my way to or from the bathroom, and all the while sank deeper and deeper into my bitter little stew, and isolated as much as I could, never joining them anymore, no matter how often they invited me.

But even though I was a terrible person and a terrible friend, my suite-mates tried to take care of me and look out for me. One night in the common area of our suite, they and a couple of the friends from down the hall had a little intervention on me. We think you have an eating disorder, they said. I was so mortified that I don’t remember how I reacted – stiffly, coldly, brushing them off, probably – but in my head, I was like: yeah, no shit! I’ve had it for like seven years, leave me alone about it, you’re just making it worse! I gave everyone in that circle an even colder shoulder, after that.

That must have been in the spring. Earlier in the year, I had signed on to rent an apartment with the two friends, the following year: a really nice little apartment just across the street from our dormitory. I’d toured the place with them, met the landlords, even cut a check for the deposit and signed the lease. But at this point, living with these girls any longer had become simply unthinkable. So I did a shitty thing. I dropped out of the lease agreement at the last minute, forcing them to have to scramble for a third roommate. I found an efficiency apartment a short bike ride away from campus, and signed the lease by myself. Finally: for junior year, a place to drink and puke and starve and rot in privacy, unbothered by concerned friends.

That girl and I stayed loosely in touch – she and the other friend never expressed any hard feelings, about me breaking the lease, or any of it, and we were still on pleasant terms, if we crossed paths on campus – but, we were not really friends anymore. After I had my little crisis and dropped out of that school, two-thirds of the way through junior year, we were still connected on Facebook; but I eventually deleted her, as well as all of my other connections from that university, and since that point, I don’t know what became of her or how she’s doing.

Of course, I did sorrowfully Google-stalk her a couple times. I think she got married, at some point, to the guy she was dating there at school: a fellow nerd and a gamer, a big quiet but funny guy, a year or two our senior. I think I saw she had a LinkedIn profile and a decent-sounding career. No surprise there. Nothing ever seemed to hold her back from doing things she wanted to do. She was crafty, good with her hands, brainy, productive (even though she enjoyed loafing on the couch with video games, she also had a lot of cool hobbies, like fashion design, theater, reading, and some kind of needlework if I remember correctly, and she was a member of various clubs), and never seemed to struggle with self-promotion or teamwork. Wherever she is these days, I’m willing to bet she’s thriving in her work life.

And I hope she’s doing well. I remember her as a genuinely honest, humble, and, yes, incredibly confident person, who made other people feel more comfortable in their own skins just by being around her. She was neither cocky nor boastful nor full of herself, nor was she ooey-gooey nice or kind or especially charitable or saintly or anything; she was just thoroughly, unapologetically herself. Many times over the years since we’ve lost touch, I’ve thought of her and contemplated her wisdom and told myself: I should try to emulate her; I should make that a goal, just for today. Be more like her, I tell myself. I always fall short, and will probably never really have her confidence; but, what a rare person, what an exceptional specimen of humanity, what a role model. I wonder sometimes if maybe that is what a saint is: not someone who follows all the rules perfectly, but someone who is really, thoroughly, shamelessly the person that God made them to be, gross feelings and gross habits and all.

Of course, I guess it is possible that she was never that confident at all. Maybe she was actually really insecure on the inside. We can never really know another person, can we? Maybe she had social anxiety or hated her body, and was just better at faking it, at putting on a brave face, than I ever was. I was never lucky enough to know her that well, I realize in retrospect; I was just a leech, looking for some positive energy to feed on because I had none of my own. I wish that sometimes there were some way I could apologize to her for the way that I was back then – but, true to form, I remain too ashamed.