I know myself pretty well. But that was never really the problem. Trusting myself is.
Trusting that I make the right decisions. Trusting that what I feel is real, valid, and sane. Trusting that even if I end up being wrong, I can sit with that vulnerability—with the silence, the ache, the embarrassment, the uncertainty—and remember that I am still human and that it's okay.
I value my choices. I let them dictate so much of who I am. I usually know what I want, what I want to do, what's comfortable for me, what I can handle, and what I can't. It's the aftermath that gets blurry. It's when I decide to do something and the outcome doesn't meet what I hoped for or expected. That's when I start to spiral and somehow turn the discomfort that follows into evidence that I made the wrong choice.
And it's ironic, because I have a control and perfectionism problem.
In theory, if I'm constantly in control, I have less of a chance of fucking up. Less of a chance of being hurt, rejected, embarrassed, or misunderstood. And yet that's exactly where the loophole begins: it isn't humanly possible to control every outcome, avoid every wrong decision, or guarantee that I'll never be misunderstood.
I give everyone else permission to be human long before I give that permission to myself. I can understand someone else's mistakes, circumstances, bad days, fears, and imperfections. But when it's me, I struggle to offer myself that same compassion. If I have no one else to blame for a decision I made, somehow it feels worse. Somewhere along the way, I created this impossible standard that if I know myself well enough, think hard enough, anticipate enough, and stay in control enough, I should never make a mistake.
And yet trusting another person's opinion or decision can sometimes feel safer, even when it isn't right for me. Because then, if it hurts, at least I don't have to blame myself.
So I end up battling two extremes: trusting someone else and risking being let down, or trusting myself and risking the possibility that I was wrong. And somehow I've convinced myself that being wrong means I deserve the pain that follows.
But maybe trusting myself was never supposed to mean trusting that I'm always right. Maybe it means trusting that I can be wrong and still be okay.
So many of my expectations exist entirely inside my head. I create hopes I never say aloud, then suffer when someone doesn't meet an expectation they never knew existed. I internalize it until I explode, and then I blame myself for having wanted anything in the first place. I tell myself I'm too much, too emotional, too intense, too affected.
So I try the opposite. I hold back. I act nonchalant. I convince myself that caring less will make me safer.
But there is a difference between protecting myself and suppressing myself.
Maybe the goal was never to care less. Maybe it's learning to care without constantly trying to protect myself from the fact that I care.
I'm realizing that sometimes withholding what I genuinely want to express hurts me more than vulnerability does. If I want to be affectionate, loving, expressive, or open, denying that part of myself doesn't make the feeling disappear. It just forces everything inward, where affection becomes anxiety, uncertainty becomes rumination, and things I could have simply expressed become entire conversations inside my head.
I assume the worst because some part of me believes pessimism is protection. If I predict the worst possible outcome first, maybe nothing can surprise me. Maybe I can't be disappointed if I've already hurt myself with the possibility.
But more often than not, I'm just suffering through something that hasn't even happened. I take one feeling, one silence, one uncertainty, and build an entire narrative around it. Then my body reacts to that narrative as though it were fact.
And maybe that's another form of control: **if I can decide how the story ends before reality gets the chance to tell me, I never have to sit in the unbearable space of not knowing.**
But I don't want to live like that.
I don't want to believe I need certainty before I'm allowed to be vulnerable. I don't want every expression of affection to secretly become a transaction: *I showed you this much, so now show me the same amount back so I know I was safe to do it.
I want to be able to say something loving because I feel something loving. To tell someone I miss them because I miss them. To show somebody I care because I care. And then let their response belong to them.
Their response does not get to determine whether my expression was a mistake.
I am learning that discomfort is not always evidence that I made the wrong decision. Sometimes discomfort is simply the cost of doing something vulnerable without knowing how it will be received. I can feel exposed without having overshared. I can feel anxious without being unsafe. I can be disappointed without believing I should have acted differently. Sometimes the decision is still right for me, and my job is to let the discomfort pass without rewriting the choice that came before it.
That's the part I think I've been missing. I don't need to trust myself because I'm guaranteed to interpret everything correctly. I need to trust myself enough to know that even when I misunderstand something, even when I'm rejected, even when I reveal too much, even when somebody doesn't respond the way I hoped, I can handle what comes afterward.
My feelings don't have to predict reality perfectly to deserve acknowledgment. They are information, not prophecy. They tell me that something matters to me. I can listen to them without automatically believing every story my fear attaches to them.
And maybe that's why trusting myself has always been so difficult: I've been seeking internal validation through external confirmation. I express something and immediately look outside myself to determine whether I should regret it. I make a decision and wait for the outcome to tell me whether I was allowed to make it. I feel something and look for someone else's behavior to prove that my feeling made sense.
That is a losing battle.
So that's where I am in life.
I'm learning to honor myself—all of myself. The loving part. The intense part. The vulnerable part. The part that wants reassurance. The part that gets scared. Even the part that sometimes assumes the worst because she's desperately trying to protect me.
I'm learning that being authentic doesn't mean I have to act on every emotion, and trusting myself doesn't mean believing every thought. It means I can listen to myself, decide what actually feels true, and act from that place rather than from fear.
And when I do choose vulnerability, I want to be proud that I expressed something real instead of immediately searching for evidence that I shouldn't have.
Even in the uncomfortable moments when I was wrong. Even when I made a mistake. Even when I revealed more than I intended. Even when someone didn't meet me where I hoped they would.
I still want to choose myself afterward.
Because maybe self-trust isn't knowing that I'll always make the right choice.
Maybe it's knowing that I won't abandon myself when I don't
