Why I Stopped Waiting to Feel Confident Before Putting Myself Out There

There’s a version of this story I used to tell myself where I was fine.

I had just moved to Charlotte. I had a plan. I was building something. I was fine.

But if I’m being honest with you, those first months were really hard. Like, quietly-crying-on-a-Saturday hard. The kind of hard that sneaks up on you because on paper, everything is okay, so you don’t quite have permission to fall apart.

I had left Chicago, and with it, I left a whole world. Years of inside jokes and Sunday brunches and friends who knew the full version of me. People who didn’t need context. A community that had taken a long time to build and that I honestly hadn’t realized I loved as much as I did until it was 700 miles away.

What I felt wasn’t homesickness exactly. It was grief. And that surprised me, because I’m someone who has moved a lot. I grew up in Rio, moved to Montreal at thirteen, lived in Kansas, built a life and career that took me across multiple countries. I know how to land somewhere new. I’ve done it before.

But this time, the loneliness landed differently.

The meetups that changed everything (even though they were awkward at first)

A few weeks in, I made myself a deal. I didn’t have to feel ready. I didn’t have to feel confident. I just had to show up.

So I found a French conversation meetup. And a Spanish one. Not because I was trying to make best friends overnight, but because language gave me a container. It gave me something to talk about other than the vulnerability of being new. It gave me a reason to be in the room.

Those early meetups were not glamorous. I was nervous. I showed up alone and made polite conversation and went home wondering if any of it would amount to anything. Some nights it felt like I was collecting interactions without actually connecting.

But I kept going. And I started doing something that felt a little scary each time: I let myself be real. I asked people actual questions about their lives, not just the polite surface stuff, but the things I was genuinely curious about. Where are you from? What brought you here? Do you love it? I let a little of my own story into the conversation too. Not in an oversharing way, just enough to be a real person instead of a networking persona.

It was awkward sometimes. There were conversations that didn’t go anywhere, and moments where I walked to my car wondering why connection felt so much harder than it used to. But I kept showing up anyway. And slowly, I started recognizing faces. People started recognizing mine.

Then came the scariest and most important step: I started asking some of the people I clicked with if they wanted to grab coffee. Just the two of us. A proper friend-date.

That felt vulnerable in a way the group setting didn’t. It was a direct ask, and a direct ask can get a direct no. But it’s also the thing that moves a casual acquaintance into something real. You can circle a group meetup for months and stay at the same comfortable surface level. The coffee is what changes it.

Some people said yes. Some were busy and it never happened. A couple of those coffees turned into friendships that I genuinely cherish today.

What I didn’t know then is that this is exactly how connection works. It’s not a lightning bolt. It’s accumulation. It’s showing up before you feel ready, being a little brave over and over in small ways, until one day you realize you belong somewhere.

The confidence myth

I work in human development. I coach people through change, through growth, through the discomfort of becoming. And one of the most persistent myths I encounter, both in my clients and in myself, is this idea that confidence comes first.

That you wait until you feel ready, and then you step forward. It doesn’t work that way. It never has.

Confidence is not the prerequisite for action. It’s the result of it. Every coach, every researcher who studies behavior change, every therapist who has sat across from someone paralyzed by fear will tell you the same thing: you don’t think your way into courage. You act your way in.

The version of me who started going to those language meetups wasn’t confident. She was sad and a little lost and trying anyway. And that trying is what eventually rebuilt something. Not just a social circle, but a sense of herself in a new place.

What grief taught me about community

Here’s the part I don’t say enough: losing a community is a real loss. It deserves to be treated like one.

I think a lot of us minimize it. We say things like, it’s just a move or at least I have technology or I can always visit. And those things are true! But they don’t erase the absence. They don’t replace the feeling of being known.

When I finally let myself acknowledge that what I was feeling was grief, something softened. I stopped being so impatient with myself. I stopped expecting the process to be faster or neater than it was.

And I started to understand, on a bone-deep level, why connection is not a luxury. It is a fundamental human need. And rebuilding it after a loss requires the same care and intention we’d give to any other kind of healing.

Why I built Filled Cups

All of that experience lives inside everything I do with this community.

Filled Cups didn’t come from a business plan. It came from knowing what it feels like to be in a city surrounded by people and still feel deeply, quietly alone. It came from the language meetups and the awkward small talk and the slow accumulation of almost-friendships that eventually became real ones.

It came from believing that putting yourself out there, before you feel ready, before you feel confident, before you have any guarantee it will work, is one of the most courageous and most human things you can do.

You don’t have to feel ready. You just have to show up. And if you need somewhere to start, I’ll be here.

Fernanda is the founder of Filled Cups, a connections community built around in-person events for friendship and romance. She hosts regular gatherings in Charlotte, NC and writes about relationships, personal growth, and the beautiful, messy work of building community.

Frank & I at a meetup at Piece of Havana, soon after moving to Charlotte