People sometimes talk about affirmations. Forget those, they are a pipe-dream. You need confirmations: bullseyes on a target, not a pep talk. Real things … which maybe don’t feel so real.

Every day find something directly connected to you that is working out. Even if it is simply putting one step after another, this is something you are doing without falling over. Think about it slowly and it will feel like a lot.

Doing this, you are researching the way you do things. You are exploring your own signature in the world, the sign of you like the thing you write out at the end of an important document. People know you by it: the way you do things. The way you do things is everything. Without a signature you have no identity, nothing to remember and nothing to be remembered by.

Confirmation is remembering who you are.

How do you begin? You begin with understanding how you hold a line. People talk about ‘keeping boundaries’ but that already sounds unreal. Draw a line on a sheet of paper. You can see it: a line. Now that line might be a boundary or the beginning of a drawing of a house (or anything else). Whatever it becomes, that line says something. You drew it, it’s not going anywhere. It’s a start or an end of something just as it sits there on the page, a line that you drew.

The more you do this the better the things you will discover to confirm.

Here is an example of something very good. Your child arrives home from school looking happy. You recall that you disagreed with your partner over which school they went to. You stuck with what you believed through arguments and some unpleasant stuff.  You were called stubborn.

Now, here’s your child looking happy. What is there to confirm? That this moment exists because you held a line. That your refusal to back down wasn’t just stubbornness—it was commitment, a belief in something real. You weren’t just difficult; you were right. And now, here’s the proof, standing in front of you, smiling.

You can hold a line. You can assert yourself.

Drawing a line is the same thing as getting angry, even if you don’t feel it. Anger lets you start or stop things, divide things up, continue things, put things together, delay things. It’s your accelerator or your brake. Thinking with lines, like this, lets you draw a line even if anger frightens you – even if you say you don’t feel it. Keep drawing lines, and eventually, you won’t just feel it — you’ll know exactly what to do with it.