By Jessica Valenti
Writer
For most of my life, I have not been able to trust my gut. That inner voice meant to protect me has been twisted and warped by a lifetime of negative messages reinforcing what I grew up believing to be true: that I don’t know what I’m talking about, or that what’s happening to me, what I’m feeling, is just something I’m imagining. For years, my intuition was silenced by the world around me, which gave it no space to grow or define itself. It felt like the whisper of lies in my ear, rather than something that might lead me to safety.
There was a voice in my head that told me I was a terrible mother for not producing enough breast milk for my premature daughter, and a sinking gut feeling that said I was overreacting whenever a boyfriend treated me poorly or a married male friend started making advances. You’re being dramatic, it whispered. It’s not that bad.
My relationship to that voice inside hadn’t always been like this, and I can remember what the beginnings of a healthy, glowing intuition felt like when I was younger. I remember a kind of knowing I possessed as a young girl—the kind of intuition that just knew the reason the boys in second grade didn’t want me on their baseball team during gym wasn’t because I wasn’t good—I knew I was—it was because they were wrong.
But as I grew older, I began to learn how to do what all the other young women were also being taught to do. We were being shown that our emotions were too loud, our instincts too wrong, and we’d better learn how to quiet them. As I grew up, what I knew to be true started to turn into what I knew I should question or be ashamed of.
As a child, I remember watching my father scream at my mother, throwing a chair at her across the dining room. I know I hated him in that moment, understanding that what he was doing was bad. But the more I saw her shrink into herself, walking on eggshells around him, the more my gut said Your mother is weak, she sets him off, don’t be like her—don’t show how you feel and what you know. My father got to act with impunity and get whatever he wanted, and I was modeled how to get quiet and stay there.
It was self-preservation, to be sure: better to identify with the person who seems stronger so you’re not the person getting yelled at. But as my intuition continued to wither, unsure what was real and what wasn’t, it failed in even the most basic ways to keep me safe.
When I was twelve and a man started to masturbate on a subway platform in front of me while I waited for the train to take me to school, I convinced myself that I must be mistaken. That I couldn’t trust my own eyes. You don’t need to run from this man on the subway, just stand there and take it. Do nothing. That is what’s safest.
My intuition and what I knew to be right or wrong were being chipped away every day, and as I grew into my teenage years, I often thought my gut reaction and my oppression were one and the same. When I was eighteen and walking down the sidewalk on my way to the first day of an internship, a man in a car pulled over and asked for directions. My gut was silent, as it had learned how to become. It didn’t tell me anything was amiss or that I should be mindful of talking to strange men on empty streets so early in the morning that it was still dark out. Instead, I cheerily stepped off the curb to help him—close enough to his car that he was able to grab my arm and try to pull me in through his window. It wasn’t until I was halfway into his car, his breath hot on my cheek, that I realized his penis was out.
I don’t know how I was able to free myself. I don’t have any memory of it. But I know that I ran toward home and knocked on the door of my aunt’s house who shared a yard with us. She gave me a shot of some kind of alcohol, I don’t know what, to calm my nerves and told me, unequivocally, how stupid I was to step off that damned curb. It wasn’t said cruelly; she was right and trying to help, and these are the lessons passed down between generations of women to try and protect us. In her own way, she wasn’t just trying to knock some sense into me but rattle my gut reaction awake so it could do its damn job. After all, I had lived in Queens my whole life. I should have known better.
By this point in my life, my inner voice was almost completely trained not to hold my best interests at heart but to align with those of men and what they wanted from me. How could it not? It had been scolded by teachers who rolled their eyes when I asked questions, family who told me not to be so loud and emotional, and commercials and TV shows that told me that the best version of myself was always going to be the pretty, polite, naive one. Year by year, my ability to be able to tell what was right and what was wrong—who was safe and who was not—became broken. And I was broken along with it.
Without the strength of an inner compass I could trust to guide me, I made all the wrong turns, often telling myself they were the right ones, because that’s what I believed to be true. I chose the wrong men, the wrong friends, the wrong classes and jobs. If I couldn’t trust myself, I’d trust everyone else, even if most people weren’t worthy of it.
As I became a young woman, I started to feel betrayed by my own intuition—or what I thought my intuition was. I wasn’t sure whose interests it was serving. I felt abandoned by myself almost entirely, my relationship to my intuitive process irrevocably distorted.
It was only when I started asking why I couldn’t trust myself—questioning how and when it happened—that I was able to piece together an answer that helped move me forward.
I stumbled into women’s studies classes and read feminists that put language to all of the unspeakable things I had in my head—women like bell hooks and magazines like Bitch. I started to see my own silencing reflected in their stories of survival, and as I read about all the ways in which they had learned to listen and trust themselves, I started to feel lighter.
It wasn’t me, I realized, that was the problem. I was damaged, to be sure, but not innately. I had been taught, over and over again, to be this way—to distrust my guts—because even though I was the casualty, it still benefited the world around me. The more unsure I was, the more I couldn’t trust myself—the better for a country that depended on that uncertainty and self-consciousness to thrive. I would buy more, question less.
I started to forgive myself for all the things that broken inner voice had said to me in my worst moments and began to recognize it as a symptom of its own oppressive conditioning. I called them what they were: lies to keep me sated. I realized that my intuition wasn’t dead—that it was just hidden. After all, finally learning how to listen to it was what had led me to question all of this in the first place.
That doesn’t mean I was able to trust myself overnight, or that I was able to tell the true from the untrue all at once. My strategy, instead, became to do the opposite of what my patriarchy-shaped gut told me to do.
When I met my husband, I had to actively work against that oppressive inner voice born so long ago when I was younger, just to be able to receive his affection and love. I realized that the only way I was going to be happy was to not give in to that old way of talking to myself but, instead, to do the exact opposite and fight to hear that voice inside that believed in me.
And it worked. I got the life I wanted by actively interrogating and questioning the part of me that wanted to tear me down and see me fail. Why did I want to get blackout drunk? How was it serving me? Why did I fuck up good friendships and embrace the bad ones? What if I just...didn’t?
I started to make good decisions, even when that bad voice inside was telling me not to. I let myself be scared and self-conscious when I decided to start writing professionally. I allowed for discomfort when I broke off habits and relationships. I ignored the remnants of my fragmented inner voice and did the things that felt all wrong.
Of course, what was really happening wasn’t that I was rejecting my true inner voice: I was just learning how to use it again, stretching and working it like an atrophied muscle that needed daily exercises to become strong again. My real intuition was peeking through the rubble, letting me know that it had always been there. I just wasn’t ready to find it yet.
To this day, a clear and easy line to my intuition is still a struggle, but I believe this is all part of the process. My gut is a shifting, evolving thing which can’t help but be influenced by the patriarchal world, and which has undergone decades worth of gaslighting and trauma. There is still a voice inside that overshadows the better parts of me. It’s the voice that still says I’m not good enough for my husband, or that despite years of feminist work that I’m a fraud. Come on, you know I’m right. Just this once.
But its begging is a warning sign I now pay attention to. Instead of giving in, I return to the signals of my body: my toes that grab sand, my fingers that type, my chest that my daughter loves to lay her head on. Most of the time, it works.
I’ve built a life protected with people who love me, people I can trust; they are the safety net when I can’t fully rely on myself to know what the right answer is. I can ask those loving and loved people what they think is actually best for me, and together, we will find the answer. They’ve become extensions of my intuition, safeguards that I’ve put in place to make sure I remember who I really am and what I really want.
And so today, I try to trust my intuition—and when I can’t, I trust my community.