Believing Yourself

It doesn’t come back all at once.

Your own voice, I mean. Your own authority. It doesn’t arrive in a dramatic moment of clarity where the clouds part and you suddenly know who you are and what you believe and how to live. It comes back the way feeling returns to a limb that’s been asleep. Slowly. Painfully. In pins and needles. And for a long time, you can’t tell the difference between sensation and static.

The first time I made a decision based on my own instinct and not somebody else’s theology, I felt sick. Physically sick. Not because the decision was wrong but because the act of trusting myself felt transgressive. Like breaking a rule that had been tattooed on the inside of my ribcage since childhood. Don’t trust your heart. Don’t follow your feelings. Don’t lean on your own understanding. The voice of authority was so deeply embedded that even after I’d rejected the system it came from, my nervous system still flinched when I tried to think for myself.

That’s the thing nobody tells you about leaving a high-control environment. You can walk out the door, but the door lives inside you. The surveillance doesn’t stop just because the surveiller is gone. You internalise it. You become your own watcher, your own critic, your own theological police. You hear the old voices in your own head, and for a while you can’t tell if they’re yours or theirs. For a while, you’re not sure there’s a difference.

Believing yourself is not confidence. I want to be clear about that, because I think the culture often offers confidence as the antidote to religious trauma, and it’s not. Confidence can be a performance. Believing yourself is something quieter and more fragile. It’s the willingness to let your own perception count, even when it shakes. Even when you’re not sure. Even when the old voices are screaming that you’re arrogant, rebellious, deceived, backsliding, dangerous.

It sounds like: I think this might be true for me.
It sounds like: Something about that doesn’t sit right.
It sounds like: I’m not sure, but I’m going to stay with the not-sure rather than override it.

Small sentences. Tentative. Half-formed. Nothing like the booming declarations of certainty that used to pass for spiritual maturity in the world I came from. But honest. God, they’re honest. And honesty, even shaky honesty, even whispered honesty, is worth more than a thousand confident sermons delivered from a place of performance.

Ada Limón, the poet, once said:

“I am most free when I am writing poems.”

I read that and felt it land in a place I didn’t expect. Because freedom, for me, had always been described as a destination. Something you arrive at when you’ve healed enough, believed the right things, done the work. But what if freedom isn’t a destination? What if it’s a mode? What if it’s the moments, however brief, where you are operating from your own centre instead of someone else’s script?

I felt it the first time I said “I don’t believe that anymore” out loud to a friend who was still inside the system. I felt it when I stopped apologising for not going to church. I felt it when I cooked a huge breakfast for my family on a Sunday morning instead of getting dressed for a service, and the guilt didn’t come, or it came but it was smaller, quieter, like an old dog that still walks to the door out of habit but no longer actually wants to go outside.

Believing yourself is a practice, not a position. Some days you’ll do it well. Some days the old architecture will reassert itself and you’ll spend the afternoon second-guessing something your body knew was right. Some days you’ll feel like you’ve lost it entirely, like the voice you’ve been slowly excavating has gone silent again.

It hasn’t. It’s just resting. It will come back. It always comes back.

Because here’s the thing about a voice that was buried rather than destroyed: it didn’t die down there. It was composting. Turning into something richer and stranger and more yours than anything you’ve ever been handed. The voice that comes back after years of suppression is not the same voice that went in. It’s lower. It’s less certain. It’s more generous. And it has a quality that the old, performed certainty never had: it actually believes what it’s saying.

Not because someone told it to. Because it arrived there itself.

NOTE TO SELF: You are allowed to trust yourself. Not because you are infallible, not because your instincts are always right, but because your own knowing is a valid source of information about your own life. You are not arrogant for listening to it. You are not backsliding. You are just, finally, treating your own voice like it belongs in the room.

L xo