Do I trust myself?

Do I trust myself?

It depends on the day you ask. Most times I’m able to make clear decisive decisions but they’re usually not risky or the results aren’t directly affecting me.

At work we practice giving our kiddos ‘Youth Voice’ which essentially means letting them make choices that affect them and exercise using their voice in a healthy manner. So that may look like choosing centers or stations in the classroom, choosing a partner, or which prize they win etc.

When I did a staff training on what ‘Youth Voice’ is and how we could offer it to our students I opened with, ‘Think back to a time in your adolescents when you exercised using your voice and felt heard’. A very simple and direct request. Some people had a harder time than others remembering a specific situation. And then at that very moment I realized there weren’t many times in my own adolescence where I felt heard or understood. I would voice my opinions and they were sometimes dismissed. It seemed as though my thoughts weren’t good enough to be shared.

So I often ‘joked’ about individuals needing to heal their childhood trauma but in reality I needed to take my own advice. I realized the feeling of being silenced and my ideas not being good enough seeped into my school performance. In group projects I may have had a great idea but was too scared to share it because I was afraid of rejection or failure. At times, when I attempted to muster up the confidence to share, I wouldn’t take the lead because although a part of me was excited to share, that voice that began to sound like my own would convince me that the idea could be better executed by someone else. Someone not me. Because I wasn’t enough to pull it off. Not smart enough, loud enough, not funny enough, I lacked it all. It didn’t help that those who I looked to for validation would sometimes brush me off or not share my excitement, so in turn, I would shrink myself and my emotions. Consequently, that turned into me searching outside of myself for validation on my thoughts about my worth, my decisions and capabilities. That thought of ‘I like this about me but do other people think the same?’ often returns.

So do I trust myself?

I wanted to wait until I had everything perfected and figured out before starting this blog. But seeing how that’s taking longer than I anticipated we’ll start here, smack dab in the midst of my self-awareness journey.