03/06/2026
A few years ago I started to notice something in myself that I didn’t really have language for at the time.
I was getting brain fog a lot. I was struggling to feel clear in my thinking, and I’d second guess myself even in small decisions. I assumed it was stress or tiredness or just life with young kids, but underneath that I think something deeper was going on.
When I look back, I grew up in a way where I didn’t really learn to trust my own thoughts. I’d say how I felt or what I thought about something, and it would often come back to me as if I hadn’t quite got it right. Not in an obvious or dramatic way, just enough that over time I started to doubt my own internal sense of things.
I became someone who adapted really well. I could read people, adjust, smooth things over, keep things connected. On the outside it probably looked like I was doing fine, but inside I was often checking myself, wondering if what I was thinking was actually valid or whether I needed to reshape it to fit better.
It wasn’t until later, through becoming a dad and going through a lot of inner work, that I started to see how much of that pattern I was still living in. I could feel how much effort it took to stay connected to myself when I was so used to orienting around other people.
One of the biggest shifts for me has been learning what it actually feels like to trust myself. Not in a big confident, “I’ve got it all sorted” way, but in a calm way where I can stay with my own thoughts and feelings without immediately questioning them or handing them over to someone else to define.
There’s been something really healing in slowly learning to stay on my own side. To not rush past what I feel. To not immediately assume I’m wrong or missing something. And to realise that loving myself isn’t some abstract idea, it’s actually just learning to hear myself clearly and not abandon that when things get uncomfortable.
I still catch myself slipping into old patterns. I probably always will to some degree. But there’s more space now between what I feel and how quickly I override it.
And that space feels like the beginning of trust.
