Sometimes we just lose our confidence. I surely do. From time to time. From minute to minute even. About a year and a half ago, I lost it big time. Well, I lost it long before that. Last year I faced the big time.

I’m a middle aged video producer. When I began my career over 30 years ago at television stations and advertising agencies, I was a young and creative hot shot of sorts. At the very least, my work was being admired and praised, and the money pretty much followed as well. I was on my way up. Keeping an ever watchful eye on larger television markets and successful agency opportunities. Should I set my sights on LA or New York? That was the big question for me back then.

Things happen. At some point while planning and goaling and dreaming – somewhere between LA and New York - I chose different but necessary paths. My vision of taking Kathy Anderson, a college friend of mine, to the Oscars in my 1971 Pinto to accept my Best Director Award like I promised her in 1976 became kind of blurred on that path.

And we age out. It happens. All the praise and admiration and money that was mine 20 or 30 years ago, has fallen into the hands of 20 and 30 year old newcomers to the business. And these younger guys are so much better at their age than I was all those years ago. They came along. They took all the plans, the goals and dreams with them. LA or New York? That decision belongs to them now.

This is nothing new. It’s part of the life cycle for most of us, I suppose. But, I was a successful parent. Very successful. Every bit as successful as I was in those early television years. More even. But that steady job went away. My child grew up.

So most of us just find ourselves wandering around, trying to recapture the professional magic we always seemed to have when we were the age our child is now. It kind of wears us down. Self-doubt becomes our shadow. And self-doubt is almost never confined to one’s professional life. It carries over into every crevice of the life we have or think we have.

If you are lucky, you will just mope around with head down for a few months. Or you can do what I did. Take it out on some of those you love most. Blame them somehow. Resentment is sort of the natural progression from confidence loss. It helps one’s own self-worth to resent others for whatever led to the loss of confidence whether or not the others had anything to do with it. That’s the path I chose. And I hurt some folks in the process. But how pathetic were they? To actually want to be a part of such a miserable existence as mine, right? So, I left them. We were all better off, I thought.

About a year and a half ago, I took my loathsome self and hid out for a while. Alone. My only goal was to take care of myself for a while. Mostly anyway. I thought I needed that. As it turns out, I think I did the right thing. For me anyway.

About the same time as my exile from humanity, a colleague of mine suggested very strongly that I do the Facebook thing. I was skeptical. But I did it. He seemed to think that social marketing and going viral was the way to go. It was strictly a business decision on my part.

I’m glad I followed that man’s advice. I have reconnected with some really incredible folks. And I have met some people I never would have otherwise. But some really outrageous things came from that Facebook experiment.

Years ago, when I tried to make it as a one-man advertising agency, I designed and wrote a company newsletter called, “The Lunar Report.” It looked pretty slick, and the writing was fair, I think. But no one ever saw that newsletter. I couldn’t really afford the printing and postage fees at the time. So I put all that aside and packed it away in an Office Depot “Store-All” box.

During my exile last year, I found all that old work. And – I was on Facebook. It occurred to me that I had an instant distribution network. And no printing charges. So, I revived the Lunar.

Naturally, I was feeling a bit better of myself. But my old pal, Self-Doubt, kept bumping me from my computer chair. I picked myself up and did it anyway. I didn’t know what I was doing really. But I did the Lunars anyway.

In the meantime, I reconnected with one very special woman. Yeh. Sometimes we lose our confidence. And just as often, a dear and sweet angel comes from out of nowhere. And takes us where we need to be. She wasn’t my first angel, and she won’t be my last. But she surely was my angel when I needed her to be.

This woman encouraged me. Made me believe things about myself that I hadn’t felt or believed or trusted in over two decades. And she showed me the writing ropes. She is still showing me such things.

Tomorrow, August 24, is the first anniversary of the inaugural Lunar Report on Facebook. The Lunar is now in six online newspaper publications. About a month ago, The Lunar launched its own site.

The Lunar Report is far from a huge hit. But it will be. Count on that.

It seems a bit odd, I guess, that an article about loss of confidence should end with such brazen remarks. Blame my dear friend for that. She gave me something I had thought was lost forever.

Now it’s on to repair some personal damage my loathsome self caused last year. It can be done. And it will. I am confident of that as well.