people will always subconsciously project their inner world onto others. insecure people will make you question yourself. anxious people will make you uneasy. conversely, people who are warm will make you feel wanted.
they say you are the average of the five people you are closest to. i feel this is especially true about how the people closest to you affect how you feel about yourself.
i feel like i have always been incredibly good at telling whether or not someone is a genuine person. if someone really cares. the extent to which they care. i almost can viscerally feel all the layers in someone. the crevices in which they hide their hurt. the lightness that manages to find its way.
i always knew i was an intuitive person. but i didn’t always know what to do with that intuition. especially when i was younger— obsessed with making decisions that made me look smart on paper. decisions that sounded right. decisions that just made sense. look at the data. triangulate your decisions with the people you respect. think thoroughly before deciding.
but when you do this you become distracted, away from what you feel and you start adopting what others believe as your own.. and then you forget about what matters to you.
moving to sf bay area was one of the decisions i made intuitively. there was no real reason for me to move. no job. no relationship. no family. no real reason.
i just knew that during the last two years i spent in nyc, i wanted to move to the bay. i spent two years searching for a real reason, but i couldn’t find it. so i got cold feet and postponed my move until i finally did.
but now i am beginning to understand why i wanted to move. it is like my subconscious knew it before i did.
my life in nyc was one full of distractions. nyc is the easiest city to do everything but get to know yourself. and in the 4am nights, i lost myself in what felt performative. what i needed was to be rooted and to find myself again. to reconnect with my intuition.
but it was not the only thing i decided on a whim that proved to be right. i will probably never admit the number of decisions i made on a whim, intuitively and impulsively, that later turned out to be so good. so much better than the ones i spent days ruminating over.
the hardest part of having intuition is learning to trust it. because learning to trust yourself and not outsourcing your decision making is to say that you are okay being wrong and you have to later live with the consequences of your own choices.
your intuition will not always be right. it is sometimes it is tangled with anxiety. anxiety will make you doubt yourself. and in life you are bound to make mistakes. but sometimes making mistakes is a way of bringing you closer to what matters and where you need to be. intuition always brings you closer.
alcohol, being around people who don’t know themselves, and outsourcing your decision making are surefire ways to dampen your intuition. conversely, being surrounded by people who genuinely care and want to care, which is so rare and so precious, listening to yourself, and being out in nature, are ways to improve your relationship with your own intuition.
when i meet someone for the first time, they always make me feel something. and over time that feeling always reverts to the mean. i can never unfeel it. i will always remember it.
ps: here is one of my recent youtube videos in case you missed it!
Joy is a tech founder building Kawara. In her free time, she reflects on the search for purpose, love, meaningful work, and meaning itself on Youtube and writes on this Substack. In a past life, she was a software engineer who hated her job. Please say hello!
Wow thank you for the insights ✨