If you’ve ever responded to someone saying something nice about you with “if they only knew who I really was” in your head, then this post is for you (and something I wish I knew years ago).

I got off a call recently and sat at my desk just thinking, probably for longer than the call actually lasted. 

Someone confirmed something I already knew but hadn’t heard out loud: the things I said would happen are happening. Not vaguely. Specifically, the way you predict a structural failure — because you can see the load-bearing wall and you know what happens when you take it out.

And for about four minutes, that felt like winning.

Then it didn’t feel like anything, because winning was never actually the thing I wanted. I already knew what I knew. I didn’t actually need external confirmation to know it was true. I’d been carrying it as fact for a while now. What I actually needed, what that four minutes gave me, underneath the noise of I told you so, was something else entirely.

Evidence.

And as a former academic, I love evidence. The funny thing is, in the past, I’ve conveniently ignored evidence that the scary thing I’m doing is positive, that it’s working, or that it means I’m doing something good.  

If this conversation had happened ten years ago, I probably would have gotten off that call and then started thinking, well, they only said that to make me feel good or because they were trying to be nice, and if they only knew who I really was, then they wouldn’t be so nice to me. 

But a lot has happened in the past 10 years, and I’m not the same me I was back then. So I took this piece of evidence to my journal (yes, I’m a big fan of a handwritten journal still and typically have upwards of 7 different notebooks and journals around me at any given time so I can make sure I catch any thoughts, or evidence as in this case, on paper). And I wrote about it. I wrote out all the details, noticed my physical response, and noticed what different parts of me thought about this confirmation. 

I’ll admit, I also ended up feeling a little emotional about it, because as I was writing, I was noticing, not the evidence itself, but how I was responding to it differently. I wasn’t telling myself all of the ways the evidence was wrong, or that the person on the call was just being nice to me, I was seeing the situation as the piece of evidence it was. 

Not proof that I made the right call. You don’t get that kind of proof, not really, not from a decision this size. What you get instead, if you’re paying attention, are small glimmers — moments that don’t resolve the uncertainty so much as they interrupt it. A little static in the signal that says keep going without telling you where going ends up.

I want to be precise about what this isn’t, because it would be easy to make it into something smaller and more comfortable than it actually is.

It isn’t blind faith. I mean, you do need some of that when you’re doing something you’ve never done before. Nothing about a big change is 100% certain, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of lie. But faith alone doesn’t hold you up when the fog gets thick. It just tells you to keep walking into it.

And it isn’t the universe handing you a verdict either. I don’t think a phone call this morning was a sign that I made the “right” decision in some cosmic sense. I think it was one data point, in a decision that’s still very much in progress, still very much scary, still very much unresolved most days.

Here’s what I think is actually true: making the decision was terrifying. Making it didn’t make the terror go away; it just changed what the terror was about. You’re still in it, still working through the actual mechanics of the thing, still scared most Tuesdays. And then, every once in a while, without asking for it, you get a glimmer. Something small. A confirmation you didn’t need but felt anyway. A sign that says: this is still the right direction, even if you can’t see the end of it yet.

The mistake is treating those glimmers as rare, or as proof, and waiting for the next one to feel steady again.

The actual practice is smaller than that. It’s keeping track. Writing the glimmer down before the fog closes back over it, because it will (often within a day). Building a private ledger of evidence that you are doing something worthwhile, so that on the days when nothing confirms anything, you have something to reach for that isn’t just faith and isn’t just hope, and most importantly, isn’t something that allows your fears to spiral.

I got off the phone knowing something I already knew. But I wrote it down anyway.

That’s the whole practice. Not certainty. Just refusing to let the evidence evaporate.

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