“I think the most unfortunate cliché in our sexual culture is the idea that women want confident men. Confidence, confidence, confidence, it’s drilled into you endlessly as a young man. The trouble is that most dudes don’t know how to perform confidence, and if you go to any meat market bar on a weekend night you’ll see guys literally puff out their chests as they go to approach a woman and then go down in flames.”
— Freddie deBoer
Ton of insight into this since the personality change, confidence as outwardly performed before didn’t seem to really do it but (to remind, when a case of COVID proceeded into my nervous system and brain, totally wiping out my anxiety) the change yielded total internal confidence – doubts are not raised, or are acknowledged, addressed, and dissipate – and acting on the basis of that is a huge panty-dropper.
The one precedent that comes to mind was this college friend who was schizophrenic and was amazingly charismatic, could lead people anywhere, even on the basis of things that if anyone else said would be immediately recognizable as literally insane, because he had just absolute untroubled confidence in himself