Learning To Trust Myself Again.

One of the hardest things to come out of everything that’s happened isn’t just the anger, or the hurt, or even the sadness. It’s the way I stopped trusting myself.

When you’ve been lied to, manipulated, and made to feel like you were the problem for so long, you start questioning everything. Every choice, every instinct, every little gut feeling. I’ve caught myself second-guessing decisions that shouldn’t even be that deep — like what to cook for dinner, or whether I’m being too harsh or too soft with Ava. And underneath it all is this whisper: “But what if you’re wrong again?” That’s the part I hate the most. Not that he lied, but that I believed him. Not that he betrayed me, but that I kept giving him chances. It left me feeling like maybe I couldn’t be trusted with my own life. But little by little, I’m learning that I can.

I trust myself when I put Ava first, every single time.I

trust myself when I listen to my body and rest instead of pushing until I break.

I trust myself when I cut people out who don’t deserve space in my life.

And I trust myself when I look at how far I’ve come, and remember that it was me who got us here.

That doesn’t mean it’s easy. Trusting myself can feel scary, too. Every time I make a choice, there’s that knot of fear in my stomach — worrying what others might think, or how they might react. Sometimes I hold myself back because I don’t want to be judged, or because I don’t want anyone to tell me I’ve made the wrong call. But then I remind myself: no one else is living this life except me. No one else has to raise Ava, or carry my story, or deal with the consequences of my decisions. That’s on me — and that’s why I have to trust myself.

I’m not fully there yet. I still wobble, I still doubt, I still wonder if I’m making the right calls. But trusting myself again feels like the key to everything. To healing. To moving forward. To building the kind of life where I don’t feel small or stupid or less than. And maybe the truth is: I don’t need to trust anyone else right now. I just need to trust me. Maybe trusting myself will always feel scary, but it's scarier to go back to silencing myself.