Can you give yourself the confidence of someone with supportive parents?
Can you give yourself the confidence of someone with supportive parents?
Amy Poehler and Jonathan Groff on Amy’s phenomenally heartwarming podcast Good Hang talk about the difference it makes to have the unconditional love of family. It allowed both of them to swing big and take risks in their careers because they knew they had a safety net—people to catch them if they fell and support them if they needed to pivot.
I listened to that episode on the heels of watching the Taylor Swift docuseries. The series follows her Eras Tour—a global phenomenon generating billions of dollars for the economies where it stopped. It also documents her career trajectory, and one episode addresses the role her family played. When she was an adolescent wanting to be a singer, her parents—who didn’t know much about the business—did what good parents do. They read books. They talked to people. They gave their daughter every bit of support she needed, including moving to Nashville so she could be closer to where she needed to be to make it.
Taylor Swift has an incredible amount of confidence in her creativity, and I can’t help but notice that much of that confidence likely stems from knowing her parents were going to support her no matter what. Even during the year she was “canceled,” or when she was trying to buy her music back and engaged in a public media battle with Scooter Braun, she must have known that no matter what happened, her family would always be there.
I’ve often wondered—just on occasion—what my life would be like, where I would be, and who I would have become if I had had supportive parents. The sort who tell you to follow your dreams and that you can be anything you want to be. The sort who make sacrifices so their children can pursue things, try things, fail, and try again.
My mother did her best to be supportive. But I remember my father attempting to talk me out of every profession I explored, dousing it with “reality”—how hard it was, what the dangers might be. This happened so often that when I started thinking about college (in a world that undervalued higher education for women), I didn’t tell him. When I started writing novels in the wee hours of the morning, I didn’t tell him. Those things were too precious to me.
I am extremely proud of myself that I paid for every bit of college and grad school with my own money. I am extremely proud of myself for not allowing my father to have a role in my author career.
And yet.
It made me wonder whether it’s possible to give yourself the confidence of someone with supportive parents if you didn’t actually have supportive parents. Where do you find that support? Is there a way to simulate it—achieve it from somewhere else? To create a support system for yourself that mirrors the unconditional love biological parents are supposed to provide?
I want to believe the answer is yes.
I want to believe there’s a way to give yourself that sort of confidence—to create your own safety net. Your own support system to catch you when you fall and steady you when you need to pivot.
I did something like this recently. I hired an author coach to help me with the novel I’m working on and to guide my author career. I specifically chose someone who is a champion and an encourager. I don’t need someone to dose me with reality—I do enough of that to myself. I needed someone in my corner. Someone to cheer me on. Someone who understands the difficulties of the author life and still believes it’s worth it.
Over the years, I’ve met friends who are authors, and we’ve found bits of encouragement in one another. So many lovely people endorsed my book. They were all colleagues, yes—but many were also friends. I didn’t just receive endorsements; I genuinely felt their support and their willingness to walk with me on this journey.
Then there’s my therapist—holding space for me when I feel like a failure, when I cry over disappointment, when I navigate anxiety.
And finally, there’s myself.
The one person who has been there from the very beginning. The one who found joy scribbling stories on lined notebook paper. The one who bullied her cousins and siblings into acting in the plays she wrote. The one who took a risk to write her first novel and kept writing even when she knew it wasn’t very good.
She’s the one who still gets up early to invest in her characters and her stories.
And even if everyone else stops fighting for her, I know deep down she will never stop fighting for herself. She can’t. She’s fought too long. She’s come too far to give up now.
So maybe it is possible to give yourself the confidence of someone with supportive parents when you didn’t have them.
Like a coat covered with patches you’ve collected along the way. But it’s still a coat. It still does the job to keep you warm. It still protects you from the elements as you move from one place to another.
Maybe it’s just as good as a coat made from original fabric.
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