Believing in yourself again

Have you spent years quietly questioning your perception of your own life? After enough years of being told that what you saw did not happen, that what you remembered was wrong, that what you felt was too much — a person begins to wonder if the ground itself is moving. That wondering and doubt is not weakness. It is the slow effect of a long, brutal storm that you have weathered. You are still here. You can trust in yourself again.

Your perception has been more accurate than you have let yourself believe. The small repeating moments that did not add up. The conversations that left you smaller than when you began them. The sense that something was off, even when no one around you could quite name it. None of that was your imagination. You were standing inside a kind of experience that does not follow the ordinary rules of logic, reason, or sanity, and you were trying — gently, faithfully — to make sense of the senseless.

That trying was not a failure. That trying was the work of a person who believed, for a long time, that reasonableness could meet any challenge head-on. You couldn't have known sooner — the knowing came when you were ready for it. First the not-knowing. Then the knowing. Then, slowly, the understanding that let you find your way back to what is real.

You can begin, today, in the smallest quiet way. Not by being certain. Not by being healed. Only by letting yourself, in one small private moment, trust what you have always known.