On what my own old journal entries taught me about trusting myself.
When I bought my first journal, one of the things I enjoyed most wasn’t just that writing made me lighter. I enjoyed reading my past entries back. The writing seemed to carry a lot of wisdom for me, later on, and I felt genuinely advised by my own words. That was the first time I got a real sense of, wow, sometimes I do have an idea worth trusting. Maybe I need to write more, so that in the moments I feel lost, I can come back to it and know that even amid uncertainty, there are still a few things I’m certain about. A few things I know from my own experience.
This was all happening in my early twenties, which made it feel even more significant. That period of my life felt so volatile. I was trying to make sense of the world, trying to find myself, find my voice. It was a lot to process. And it was amidst all that confusion that I found consolation, glimpses of hope, in myself. That there was something wise in my own voice. That the words of encouragement I hoped to hear from the world, I was actually capable of telling myself.
What makes you trust anyone, really?
Here’s a question worth sitting with: what makes you trust someone? Just anyone. Think of the person you trust the most. What makes you trust them?
Most of the time, the answer ranges from an innate feeling, to “I’ve known them the longest,” to “they’ve never disappointed me.” They show up no matter what. They’re there through thick and thin. Somehow, they’ve proven something through consistent action, or just their way of being, in a way you didn’t have to engineer. You don’t have to pay them back or convince them to show up for you. Yet they do. And that makes you want to do the same for them.
That’s the framework of self-trust, externalized. If we applied it to ourselves, we’d assume self-trust should feel innate. Like, duh, why wouldn’t I trust myself? And yet that couldn’t be further from the truth, most of the time. More often, we feel unsure about what to do or say. We find ourselves looking outside for confirmation of what we should do, say, or even think. Trusting ourselves can feel foreign in our own body or mind. So we delay decisions. We stay in the “I don’t know” realm longer than we should, and suddenly we feel unsure. Not quite sure-footed.
Self-trust is a muscle
The truth is, self-trust works more like a muscle. The more you trust yourself, the more you trust yourself. Self-trust begets self-trust. So how do we get to the point where it feels natural, innate?
That’s where self-knowledge comes in. Think back to that reason for trusting someone: they’ve shown up consistently over time, until it feels like simply their nature. The same is true for self-trust. If you trust yourself long enough, you develop that same innate ability. You become more sure of yourself, and of what you’re actually about.
The pillar underneath it all
All of that rests on one pillar: self-knowledge. Self-knowledge isn’t an on-and-off switch. It’s a lifelong mission to unravel who you are, why you’re the way you are, why you do what you do, and why you show up the way you do. Self-knowledge is, in a sense, the sum of who you are as a person. You can’t fully comprehend all of it, but you can gain a real sense of the core aspects that make up the lens you interpret your life through. Events change, but the lens you see them through, what psychologists might call your self-concept, tends to stay fixed, unless you decide to change it.
When you actually invest in knowing yourself as you evolve, it’s possible to become so well-versed in yourself that you come to appreciate your own self-knowledge. From there, you can feel that innate self-trust settle in. It’s part of why we tend to trust older people for advice. We assume they know a thing or two. But what’s really happening is embodied self-trust, built over years of cultivating that muscle through the continuous updating of self-knowledge. That’s what makes someone trustworthy, not only to themselves, but to other people too. It’s also what makes it easier to offer real wisdom and guidance to others, and for them to actually trust it.
So self-trust and self-knowledge have a directly proportional relationship. The more you know yourself, the more you trust yourself. But they’re not mutually exclusive, either. You can know yourself and still have other things impair your ability to trust yourself. You can also trust yourself from a place of self-ignorance.
When self-knowledge and self-trust don’t match up
I’ll illustrate this with a time I was deceived by someone, and thought, well, knowing myself, I should have seen it coming. But I had to confront the fact that part of me had been naive, and I had to deal with my own assumptions about people’s intentions and how I evaluate them. I saw the signs. I ignored them.
That was a case of high self-knowledge paired with low self-trust, and not enough courage to defend what I actually knew. It took the people around me repeatedly asking if I was sure about this person before I finally asked myself: what am I missing here? As soon as I asked that, I was able to look clearly for ways to substantiate my own patterns, and admit that yes, something was off. Luckily, nothing bad came of it. But for a long time, I couldn’t quite believe that someone who knows herself as well as I do could still be willing to distrust that self-knowledge, and look past all the evidence sitting right in front of me.
Where this leaves Renew90
What ultimately strengthened my own self-knowledge was self-reflection through journaling, alongside real, heart-to-heart conversations with people I trust. It’s only when I can see how I arrive at a position that I start to trust my own process. And when that position holds up in conversation with others, it gets confirmed further, adding the layer of hearing different perspectives without immediately abandoning my own self-knowledge, and even refining how I generate and evaluate it going forward.
That’s the philosophy Renew90 is built around: an opportunity to begin a self-reflection journey that helps you clarify, or clean, your own lens. Along the way, you build real self-awareness around your emotional patterns, and you get the chance to practice tapping into your wiser, higher perspective through the Flip Journal.
If this resonated, Renew90 Journal is available on iOS and Android.