I'd rather be Professor McGonnagall actually

I don't buy ornaments, I don't own ornaments, I don't even really like ornaments. Dust collectors, my mother called them, and I very much agree. I particularly do not like kitschy twinsy chirpy little cheaply made bird ornaments, no offence to birds.

I bought these anyway. I found them for $1 in a Hospice op-shop and somehow had to have them. I couldn't explain it then, and I can't explain it now, other than we are all something of a mystery, even to ourselves. I think that's a bit good? And a lot terrifying.

Before I went shopping I had been spending the morning making up business cards (for a business that is yet to exist...) and trawling through old Instagram photos looking for some artwork or photography to adorn them. It was unexpectedly, brutally, sad; I've never been high on confidence in my own work, but I could see clearly in my photographs through the last couple of years the point where that confidence went from low to not existing. They were as bland and pointless on the outside as I have been feeling on the inside. I felt such a loss of that old imperfect but ever optimistic Megan. She had a spark of something I no longer have; she believed that even if she wasn't good at things right now, she might one day be good at them in the future. It was enough to enliven a lot of her work and her ideals.

This is the bit where I write something rousing and uplifting to push the sads back down again, but I'm not going to. I'm not unhappy with my life in general, and lack of one individual's confidence is hardly an armageddon level problem. But it matters to me, and I think that without that spark, it is much harder to do useful work, to make helpful changes, individually and collectively. It is much harder to 'do' at all. Life becomes stew without seasoning; nutritious but lacking that essential sensual something that makes nutritious yum. Who wants to make, let alone eat, let alone offer to share with others, a stew without seasoning?

Well, but anyway. It's important to keep making the stew regardless; no-one cares about my bloody stew but me, and if confidence is the metaphorical salt in this scenario, then fake the confidence. Borrow someone else's, buy some weird kitschy bird ornaments and assign them magic confidence-giving powers. Pretend a fairy godmother has just granted you a life-time supply of the stuff.

Fake, real, it doesn't matter. Confidence is a belief, it is smoke and mirrors, not some measurable material reality; whatever the world might do or be to us, whether we have been labelled muggle, wizard, or squib, we can all be Harry Potter on the inside.