I have a habit of designating credit to more than where it’s due. As a teenager, I left it up to those around me to have a more significant impact on my personality than I was willing to discover on my own. In the summer of 2013, I was fresh off the high of graduating high school and heavily impacted by my treatment of people I put a lot of value to. I had continued my self-imposed reputation (a figment I assumed others would admire and think of me differently – they did not.) and spent a portion of the summer traveling to different states for concerts. Travel was something that I had grown to love just in the past year and it evaded me why it was so mystical. At the end of the year, I was preparing to travel to Wilmington with Ciara, a friend who had come to visit me from Michigan (I was big into making friends over the internet) and we were looking for songs to listen to on the 3-hour drive. I said “..you know who I’ve been meaning to check out?” and pulled up Tumblr, scrolling through my likes with a purpose. As I scrolled, I explained that this was a band I had found when looking up 5 Seconds of Summer posts. There was a video of them with Michael Clifford sitting on a couch and them popping up behind him, and it caught my eye. One of my favorite things at that time was finding new bands to listen to; this felt like it could be a good find. We went to Youtube, typed in the name “With Confidence Band” and listened to “Tonight.” My face dropped. Hers did too. There was an energy created from the interest in this song that still evades me today. We listened to a few other songs and sat with the new information. I said “you know… I just want to listen to that first song again.” So we did. And despite the hundred songs we had queued for the drive, we listened to Tonight more times than I could count. In the coming months, she and I became “WithConUS” which was a half-assed Twitter street team (do you guys remember street teams? Good lord.) where we annoyed people on the internet telling them about With Confidence, hoping that being in the US as pop punk began to rise would help assist their career despite them being in Australia. In my head, this was a band I’d support as much as I could without ever actually seeing them live because I was SURE they’d never make it to the United States. This was to no fault of their own, but my cynicism was confident this would be another one of those situations I had endured so many times before. As WithConUS slowly became a desolate username, With Confidence quickly grew in popularity. According to my bias: once they hit US soil, the attention on them grew tremendously. With every show I attended that was bigger than the last, my pride grew. One November I wore a piece of their merch designed to look like an ugly sweater. Because it was November and I worked in a very holiday-centric business, I decided to treat my boss and I to some smoothies from Smoothie King to help us through the next few days. The guy behind the counter handed me my first smoothie, then a straw, then said “you like With Confidence?” Working in a very clean-cut, wealthy, holier-than-thou town, this was the last thing I expected from the guy handing me my desperation at 8 am. We talked for a few minutes and I went on my merry way, smoothies in hand, thinking this may be bigger than I originally thought. As the years progressed and the With Confidence balloon continued to inflate with opportunities, I continued with a life that was more stressful and concerning than it was enjoying the things I once found worth in. Music was the one place I could throw myself and would stick. That quickly became unusual territory. My struggles with anxiety and depression grew against the sounds of the “shoulds” and “should nots” while I transformed from an anxious teenager to an anxious adult. A lot of the characteristics stayed the same but the expectations didn’t and I was quickly buried under the self-imposed prospects for what my life could be if “I wasn’t” this or “I wasn’t” that. I started therapy in 2019 and had an inkling this was a step in the right direction. At the same time, With Confidence was preparing to go on a headlining tour with Seaway, Doll Skin, and Between You and Me and had just been featured on Volume 2 of the “Songs That Saved My Life” project, covering Drops of Jupiter by Train. The night before their show in Durham, NC I had the biggest anxiety attack I have ever had, still to this day. And it was all because I was worried about parking. What started as a concern for travel then turned into why I was still going to shows because it seemed childish as someone trying to be a functioning adult and that turned into a spiral that left me curled in the fetal position not being able to hear myself breathe over the thoughts I was having. I had listened to their cover of Drops of Jupiter and cried even harder. I watched an interview Jayden did about why they chose that song, where he talked about mental health, and cried harder at that. I went to sleep with puffy eyes and woke up the next morning with the intent to explain vaguely to my sister some “logical” excuse as to why we couldn’t go. Instead, I was honest and said that I had a rough night mentally and I didn’t think we’d make it. She looked at me and said “so… no WithCon?” and the sadness in her voice made me crack when I said “no, no WithCon” and I began crying again. That moment is what made me decide to take a step further in my journey with therapy and stick with it, whatever it took. I made the decision to start on antidepressants (even though it scared me) and try to better my life with a purpose. Since then, my healing journey has skyrocketed, but With Confidence has slowly grown quiet. In June, Ciara and her girlfriend passed through North Carolina on their way to a concert and we had dinner. Amidst some conversation, I explained that I felt like With Confidence was going to break up because of how muted they had seemed and that one of their original members was not on their tour with Stand Atlantic. At the show in Charlotte, I was standing next to the sound booth in the middle of the venue and had accepted that if this was the last time I saw them, I would be okay. When the band announced they were going on a headlining tour at the start of this fall, I thought “maybe my intuition is wrong this time.” Today I woke up to a missed call and several panicked texts from several different people all sending me the same screenshot: a pointed post on the With Confidence accounts stating they are done after these final tours. And I was strangely peaceful. And I spiritually nodded at my intuition – a piece of me that is seldom wrong. As I look back on what we’ve all accomplished in the almost 9 years I’ve been a supporter of With Confidence, the difference between the start of this journey and now is night and day. Though I have begun to find it difficult to give credit to people who have changed me – because I ultimately accept or deny the change in the end (and I have control issues) – I owe a lot to the band for who I’ve become because of what they’ve created and put into the world. By simply following a dream they had 10 years ago, they’ve impacted so many lives, supported a music scene, and changed the trajectory of their own paths all in one fell swoop. At the end of the day: no number of metaphors can describe how my life has developed simply by sticking with something I saw promise in. By never losing sight of the mysticism I once saw in touring, music media, lyrics, creating, and purely admiring people no matter how weirdly cult-ish it feels, I have a better understanding of the satisfaction in seeing something from beginning to end.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself in all of this, it’s that my loyalty seldom wavers. That alone gives me a greater sense of purpose than I could ever artificially manufacture. I truly do owe a lot to With Confidence because of the impact they’ve had on my life, just by doing what they do best. And to that, I can truly give credit where credit is due. In some ways, this feels like a loss of a piece of me I once knew very well. It is a nostalgic type of loss, one that is difficult to explain.
In the end, my writing process is similar to human development in the way that I’m just making it up as I go. Most of what I write comes from memory, reflection, the nostalgia. It comes from life experiences, though very few and far between, and I have a film reel of reminders of With Confidence and how they enlightened the life I so often resented outside of a venue. I’m so thankful to have experienced NINE YEARS STRAIGHT of being a fan of someone and being appreciated in the same way.
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