Rediscovering my intuition
Dulled by years of being told that my instincts were wrong, I learn to trust my instincts to finish my masters.
Originally published in my personal blog on November 30, 2019.
There are so many things that I need to relearn, and one of them is trusting my instincts.
I always knew that my instincts are pretty spot on and strong. Still, I never really used them because my parents are not naturally intuitive. They tend to put down my emotions and instincts as not logical.
I often struggled to hide my emotions because my parents repeatedly said that my feelings are wrong, and I am not supposed to feel the way I feel. I should be that good girl, be compliant. Yet, they contradict themselves when they told me that I shouldn’t be affected by what people say and do what is right.
If I point out inconsistencies with their statements, my parents say I am not listening to them. They often mistake my disagreements with them as disobedience towards them. Worse, they assumed that my disobedience to them is also transferred to my bosses and supervisors. It hurts me so much that they make their assumptions about me based on my relationship with them.
Despite my explanations, one of my parents did not want to update their filters about me. Because of that, I have created a boundary between one of my parents and myself. When I encountered failure, one of the parents said that I failed because I did not do anything. Instead of clarifying why I failed, I was accused of my past weaknesses.
Why am I writing this post?
I struggled in my academic writing, which uses a lot of logic. I can credit my parents’ use of reason since they have T in their Myer Briggs type indicator. Despite being an emotional person, I can fool psychologically ignorant people by putting up a logical front. Some of these psychologically ignorant people do think I am very logical for a feeling person. Well, my parents had trained me so much in being rational and giving evidence in whatever I do.
However, logical and evidence-based thinking also means my instincts are often shut down by rational people. Sometimes instincts cannot be proven because it has elements of anticipation. Furthermore, instincts find a different way from the norm when everything else fails. Unfortunately, I get shut down many times for being wrong just because I followed my instincts.
I became so afraid of making mistakes because I did not know how to manage emotions and logic. I ignored my instincts because people think I am making it up. Worse still, I ignored it because of my academic writing when everything needs to be cited.
I am finally learning again to trust my instincts, thanks to one of my supervisors. I thought I was struggling with my writing and lack of logic. I asked him a question, and after he ran through certain parts of my writing, he told me that I should just trust my instincts in my writing.
It took me a while to understand his advice on trusting my instincts. I kept asking second to third opinions about my writings, but everyone just asked the same thing, “What the story?”
Then I realised I just need to trust my instincts and just write without fear. Now, my writings are slowly forming up. It’s not great, but finally, it is getting somewhere.
And this post is to remind me how timely that advice was.
