“The freedom I feel to be my authentic self comes from a place of trust.”

Without consciously being aware of it, I lost trust in my abilities and myself. Years of teaching, parenting, and leading — layered with the hormonal shifts of perimenopause — had quietly rewired my brain toward panic as a default. I stopped believing I could handle things. I started looking outward for the courage and rational thought I no longer trusted myself to find.

I went to Spain to see my son. I didn’t know I was also going to find out what I was still capable of.

The moment I understood something was shifting came on my second full day in Madrid. My son and I had plans to meet later, and I had the morning to myself. I found the subway, counted the stops, and stepped off the platform into an unfamiliar part of the city. I walked into a Starbucks and ordered coffee from a cashier who spoke no English. I wandered through a square, followed a narrow winding path that felt almost secret, and stumbled into a fabric shop — something I had hoped to find but hadn’t fully trusted myself to locate. I wandered in and out of the textile shops because I could. No one to please but myself. No one to rush me past the things I loved.

It was exhilarating. And it set the tone for everything that followed — including the afternoon I spent alone in Valencia, and the moment I returned to find my son asleep on the couch, finally at rest. None of that would have meant what it meant without that Madrid morning. I needed the small proof first.

What I understand now is that self-trust isn’t retrieved in one dramatic moment. It’s rebuilt in a stack of small ones. A subway stop counted correctly. A coffee ordered in the wrong language. A fabric shop found by following your own instincts down an unfamiliar alley. The acts themselves are small. What they add up to is not.

If you’re reading this and something in it feels familiar — the looking outward, the quiet erosion of confidence in yourself — I want to ask you something honest.

Where do you have evidence that you’ve lost trust in yourself? Not to judge it, but to name it. Because you can’t move toward something you haven’t located yet.

Find, take, or draw an image that represents where you are right now in your relationship with yourself. Write freely. Then ask: where am I still looking to others for what I used to find in myself — and what is one small place I could begin to look inward again?

This is an Insights post where I unpack lessons and meaning from the original version in the Alchemy in Progress category. Find the original here.