How to Trust Yourself Again When Someone You Thought You Knew Blindsides You

Day 253 of a 365-day commitment to show up and write my truth

I had been praying for someone.

I hadn't heard from them, and after enough time passed, my mind started filling in the blanks. I wondered if something was wrong. I hoped they were okay. I sent up those little prayers we send when we don't know what else to do: Please let them be okay. Please let whatever they're going through work itself out.

The irony of that is not lost on me now.

Because while I was worrying about this person, something landed in my lap that made me realize I hadn't known them nearly as well as I thought I did.

Someone sent me information. I'm intentionally not sharing what it was, because protecting people's privacy matters more to me than making this story juicier. The details aren't really the story anyway.

The story is that I saw it myself.

This wasn't gossip passed from one person to another until nobody remembered where it started, and it wasn't an accusation either. Nobody sat me down and said, you won't believe what I heard.

It was right there in front of me.

My first reaction was basically: there is no freaking way.

Not because the proof wasn't clear. It was. Because the person I was looking at through this new information seemed like a completely different person from the one I thought I knew.

Before that moment, I would have described them as kind. Funny. Generous. The real deal.

And suddenly my brain was trying to fit that person together with this other side I had never seen.

They did not fit.

If you've ever loved or trusted someone and then had reality hand you a different version of them, you know that specific kind of dizzy. Every conversation afterward gets replayed, and you wonder what you were actually looking at the whole time.

How to Trust Yourself Again When Your Judgment Gets Shaken

I think that's the part that has stayed with me most.

Of course I was shocked by what I learned about them. But underneath that shock came a more uncomfortable thought: how the heck did I not know?

I consider myself an intuitive person. I'm usually pretty good at reading people. I notice little things. I pay attention to how people treat other people, not just how they treat me. I've lived enough life to know that someone's words can tell you one thing while their behavior quietly tells you another.

And yet, apparently, I am still a human being and not a professionally installed airport security system.

Every once in a while, somebody gets through.

That's hard to admit, because being blindsided doesn't just change the way you see another person. It messes with the way you see yourself.

You start going backward. Was there something I missed? Did I let my guard down? Did I only see what this person wanted me to see?

I don't know. I've replayed it enough to realize I could make myself crazy trying to locate the exact moment I was supposedly meant to know something I had no real way of knowing.

That's maybe the actual starting point for trusting yourself again: not punishing yesterday's version of you with information you only have today.

Hindsight is kind of an nincompoop that way. It walks into the room holding all the evidence and acts like you'd both had it the entire time.

We hadn't.

I knew the person who had been presented to me. I cared about that person. I believed certain things about them based on what I had actually experienced. Hell, I was praying for them.

That doesn't make me stupid. It makes me someone who didn't have all the information yet.

Self-Trust Was Never About Always Being Right

I don't have a beautiful ending where I've processed all of this and can hand you five things being blindsided taught me about humanity.

It's been about five minutes emotionally. I'm still somewhere around wow, I really did not see that coming.

But I've been thinking about what it actually means to trust your intuition, because I think I've had that definition slightly wrong.

Trusting myself doesn't mean I'll correctly identify everyone's character before they ever get the chance to surprise me. It isn't about becoming so guarded that nobody can fool me again. What kind of life would that even be?

Self-trust might just be this: when new information shows up, I don't look away because the truth is inconvenient. I believed this then. I know this now. Neither one cancels the other out, and weirdly, that settles something in me.

I don't want this to turn me into someone suspicious of every kind person I meet, interrogating every friendship and every generous gesture because one person reminded me that people can contain sides of themselves we know nothing about. But I also don't want to pretend I didn't see what I saw just because the old version of the story felt nicer.

I don't want to be naive again. I also don't want to be hard. I'm still figuring out what's left once you take both of those off the table.

I'm still trusting my instincts, still willing to believe most people are good. But I'm also paying closer attention when life hands me evidence that says otherwise about one of them.

That might be what intuition actually looks like as we get older. Less about never being wrong about anyone, more about trusting myself enough to face it when I am.

I thought I knew someone. Turns out, there was a lot I didn't know.

I'm still disappointed. I'm still shocked. My internal radar and I may be having a small performance review.

I'm not ready to stop trusting myself, though. If anything, this is probably part of learning how.

About the Author | Day 253 of 365

I'm a coach, a writer, an entrepreneur, and a mom — and apparently still someone who can consider herself a pretty damn good judge of character and then occasionally receive information that makes her wonder whether her internal radar called in sick that day.

For 253 days, I've been writing about what a real life actually looks like: motherhood, grief, healing, faith, love, business, starting over, learning to trust myself — and, apparently, discovering that trusting yourself doesn't come with a lifetime guarantee you'll never be completely wrong about another human being.

There was a part of me that wanted to go backward and figure out what I missed. I'm trying not to do that. I knew what I knew then. I know something different now. Both versions of me were working with the information they had.

Learning how to trust yourself again probably isn't promising you'll never get blindsided again. It's knowing that if the truth eventually lands in your lap, you won't abandon yourself just because you wish it weren't true.

Day 253 of 365. Still trusting. Still learning. Radar currently undergoing maintenance. 🐧