Just watch me
Trust doesn't break all at once. It breaks in one moment, and it rebuilds in a thousand quiet ones.
There is usually a moment.
Not a slow drift, not a general loss of confidence, but a specific point in time where you backed your own judgement, fully, and it went badly wrong.
Mine happened years ago. I won’t go into the details, some things are mine to keep, but I trusted where I shouldn’t have, against everything in me that was quietly saying no. I overruled it. And it cost me more than I want to put a number on.
What followed wasn’t just the loss itself. It was what the loss did to the one thing I’d always been able to rely on: my own judgement.
Here is what nobody tells you about that kind of moment. It doesn’t just hurt. It rewires something.
For years afterwards, I kept making decisions, plenty of them, good ones, even, but I made them differently. I checked. I asked. I ran things past people who, if I’m honest, hadn’t earned the right to weigh in, simply because they were there and I wasn’t sure of myself anymore.
I look back now and I can see it clearly: I was operating without the one instrument I used to navigate by. So I borrowed everyone else’s instead.
That is, I think, where the habit of waiting for permission actually comes from. The thing I wrote about last week. Not a personality trait. Not caution for its own sake. A scar. The quiet aftermath of a moment when trusting yourself went wrong, and some part of you decided it wasn’t safe to do that again.
The people closest to me, at the time, mostly agreed with that conclusion.
Not maliciously. Often with love, even. But the message, in various forms, was the same: this isn’t for you. Find something steadier. You’re not the type.
Looking back, I don’t think they were describing me. I think they were describing the version of me that existed immediately after the mistake.
And for a long time, I believed it. Not because I’d run out of ability, I hadn’t. I was still doing the work, still solving the problems, still the person others came to when something needed sorting. But underneath all of that competence sat a quiet agreement I’d made with myself: never again, not fully, not with everything.
Rebuilding trust in yourself is nothing like the moment it breaks.
The breaking is sudden. The rebuilding is not. There is no morning where you wake up and it’s back. Instead, there’s a decision. Then another one. Small, mostly invisible, each one a tiny bet that your judgement might actually be sound after all.
Most of them, nobody else even notices. You notice. That’s the whole point.
And slowly, so slowly that you can’t point to the moment it happened, the same way you can point to the moment it broke, the evidence accumulates. Not because anyone declared you trustworthy again. Because you kept showing up as the only witness to your own track record, and the track record kept being good.
Somewhere in that long, undramatic stretch, a phrase started showing up in my head whenever someone doubted me, including, especially, the version of me that still doubted herself.
Just watch me.
I used to think of it as defiance. I don’t, anymore.
It’s evidence-gathering. Every time I said it, to someone else, or just to myself, and then did the thing, that was one more data point. One more small proof that my judgement, the thing I’d stopped trusting, was actually still there. Still good. Maybe better than it had ever been.
The trust I have in myself now is not the trust I had before any of this happened.
That earlier version was untested. It had never had to survive anything. This one has. It’s been stress-tested by the worst decision I ever made and rebuilt, deliberately, decision by decision, over years.
That makes it worth more, not less. A muscle that’s been broken and reset is often stronger at that point than it ever was before.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of that rebuild right now, if you’ve had the moment, and you’re in the long quiet stretch afterwards where nobody can see what you’re doing but you, I want you to know it counts. Every one of those small decisions counts, even the ones nobody will ever know about.
Especially those.
Is there a version of “just watch me” running quietly in your own head right now? What’s it responding to? Hit reply and tell me. I read every one, and I would love to know.
Warmly,
Pia
The Strategic Second Act is where I work with women who are ready to stop waiting and start building, on their own terms, with the experience they have spent decades accumulating.
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