Today, in the middle of a Peloton Day One ride with Robin ArzĂłn, she asked us to name the one thing we were leaving behind.
Mine came quickly.
Self-doubt.
I didnât have to search for it, which probably tells me something.
I have spent a good part of this year dressing self-doubt up as other things: patience, perspective, being fair, waiting for more information.
All qualities I genuinely value.
All very convenient hiding places when I donât want to trust what I already know.
I have been extraordinarily generous with explanations for other people and strangely stingy with trust in myself.
I have sat inside work I know I am good at and wondered whether I was somehow misreading my own value. I have watched things I built get moved around, renamed, reassigned, discussed differently, and then gone home wondering whether I was taking it too personally.
That one bothers me now.
Too personally.
Of course some things are personal.
You can spend years caring for something, building it, protecting it, making it better, and still somehow believe the most mature response when it changes in front of you is to feel nothing.
I know what I saw. I know what it cost me.
What surprises me is how much time I spent trying to convince myself I might be wrong about both.
I have done this outside of work too.
A date feels off, and instead of letting âoffâ be useful information, I begin cross-examining myself. Maybe I misunderstood. Maybe Iâm being too particular. Maybe I should give it another chance.
There have been conversations I left knowing exactly how I felt, only to spend the drive home constructing a better argument for the other person.
Apparently I am an excellent defense attorney for everyone but myself.
And then there is the work I am building now.
The writing. The ideas. The things that do not have a company name attached to them or a room full of people ready to tell me whether they count.
I can believe deeply in something at nine in the morning and question the entire premise by four because the numbers didnât move fast enough.
I can write something I know is true and then wonder whether anyone cares.
Apparently self-doubt does not disappear just because you become accomplished.
It gets better vocabulary.
Mine rarely says, You canât do this.
It sounds much more reasonable.
Give it a little more time.
Donât make too much of this.
Maybe they didnât mean it that way.
Maybe you should try harder first.
That is why it has been so difficult to recognize. It sounds enough like wisdom that I have mistaken one for the other more times than I can count.
But lately another question has been showing up.
Is this worthy of me?
Even writing that makes some old part of me flinch.
It sounds conceited when you have spent most of your life evaluating yourself from the opposite direction.
Am I worthy of the job? The relationship? The opportunity? The attention? The room?
We are very comfortable asking women to prove their worthiness.
It feels almost indecent to turn the question around.
Is this worthy of my time?
My energy?
The part of my life it will occupy?
Is this worthy of me?
I am fifty-four years old. Time feels different when you can no longer pretend it is unlimited.
I donât mean that morbidly. I mean it clarifies the math.
I have enough history with myself now to know that I will survive a wrong decision.
I have chosen badly. Stayed too long. Trusted people I shouldnât have. Walked away from things I once thought I could not live without. Started again when I had absolutely no interest in starting again.
And somehow I keep ending up here.
Still curious. Still building. Still wanting things.
Maybe self-trust was never supposed to mean being certain I am right.
Maybe it is knowing that being wrong will not destroy me.
Someone will underestimate me again. Someone will fail to choose me. Something I build will not work. I will misread a situation. I will want something that does not want me back.
None of that is preventable.
What I am increasingly unwilling to do is meet disappointment there and immediately start helping it build a case against me.
I have done enough of that.
In a few days, Iâm leaving on a trip I questioned more than once.
Not because I didnât want to go.
Because it did not look the way I had imagined it would.
I had a picture in my head of what a trip like this was supposed to look like, who would be beside me, what it would mean about my life.
Reality did not cooperate.
For a while, I let that become evidence.
Maybe I shouldnât go. Maybe it would only make me notice what was missing. Maybe the fact that it looked different meant something had gone wrong.
There it was again.
Taking something I wanted and putting it on trial because my life had not arranged itself around the picture in my head.
Iâm going.
I want to see the ocean. I want the ridiculous theme nights and the sun and the drinks and the mornings when no one needs anything from me.
Mostly, I want to see what happens when I stop requiring my life to look a certain way before I let myself enjoy it.
I suspect self-doubt will make the trip too. Habits that old donât disappear because you named them during a Peloton ride.
But maybe leaving something behind doesnât require never hearing from it again.
Maybe you just stop letting it reopen the case.
So Iâm packing.
Iâll see you when I get back.