Trust yourself to know what you know
and also, question it.
Trust yourself to know what you know.
This line by Ashley C. Ford revisits me often. Trust yourself to know what you know. She describes that regardless of how others react to what you’ve experienced or what they might say about what you believe, you’ve got to be able to trust what you know. Not everyone will see your point of view. Not everyone will ‘believe’ what you do, many people will disagree, and some will choose to arrogantly champion their own ideas over all others. As painful as it is to have someone deny our reality, as irritating as it is when someone misrepresents something that they don’t know anything about — we can continue to trust ourselves.
We are supposed to have our own perspectives. Our ability to uniquely contribute to the collective depends on how we individually perceive of what is. We are not supposed to see everything in the same ways as everyone else, and if we are being honest with ourselves — we actually don’t. We see the world based on what we have experienced, what we know and don’t know, who we spend time with, our beliefs, our desires, our genes. How we feel in our bodies and what we think in our minds creates constantly shifting subjective realities.
Because I live for the and-but-also of it all, I’ve been considering how trusting our own subjective realities must also come with the awareness that there is no ultimate objective truth for everyone.
Therapy and psychology have brought the ‘both/and’ line of thinking more mainstream — the idea that many things can be true at the same time. We can be both excited and nervous. We can be angry and still love, we can feel grief and also relief. Seemingly conflicting states can exist together.
We can trust ourselves while also challenging what we think we know. We can believe in our (ever-evolving) truths, while allowing for others to have their truths.
Remember your discernment
Even though we might be wrong, or change our minds as we learn more, we need not doubt our current selves or mistakenly think we should adopt someone else’s entire worldview.
The point is (obviously) not to take someone else’s word as God, nor is it to become so narcissistic that we believe our word is God. We don’t need more people accidentally joining cults or thinking they should start one.
The practice, it seems, is to trust ourselves without seeking excessive validation or condemning the way another person sees things.
Let us trust our ability to discern.
My work for you is on myself
We cannot control what other people think or believe. We cannot change another person, regardless of how badly we may want to. As Ram Dass has so eloquently said, “all I can do for you is work on myself. All you can do for me is work on yourself.”
We may not ever see ‘eye-to-eye’ with someone or get the validation we think we need. Maybe instead of worrying about how we are perceived or trying to convince others of our rightness, we focus our energy on being and becoming feels valuable and correct for us.
If we’re acting with integrity, we can more easily maintain our sacred ground amidst alternative rocky narratives.
Let us trust in what we do know, and dance the dance of what we don’t. Let us be brave enough to allow ourselves to change.
xx, maggie
Reading lately — David Abram’s “The Spell of the Sensuous”
Listening lately — A Millennial’s Guide to Saving the World with Anya Kaats