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Long before I distrusted men, institutions, or authority, I had already learned to distrust myself.

I learned it in childhood—where obedience mattered more than individuality, where children were expected to help, adapt, stay quiet, and take up very little space.

My early life was shaped by divorce, poverty, and emotional instability, where safety depended on constant awareness of other people’s moods.

Somewhere inside that landscape, my nervous system learned hypervigilance.

To read rooms the moment I entered them.
To track tone before words were spoken.
To adjust myself before I was asked.

I became adaptable. Helpful. Easy to manage. Emotionally attuned to everyone except myself.

I became a chameleon.

And like many children in unstable environments, I mistook adaptation for identity.

What I did not understand then was that self-abandonment was not something I would later develop. It was something I was taught.

Over time, I learned that staying connected to others often required leaving myself.

If I paid too much attention to my own discomfort, I risked disrupting the emotional balance around me. So I learned to override it. To minimize it. To move past it quickly.

At the time, this didn’t feel like self-betrayal—it felt like functioning.

Like being good.
Like being strong.
Like being safe.

But slowly, something internal began to erode.

I stopped trusting my own signals unless they were confirmed externally. I delayed my needs until they became urgent. I second-guessed what I felt if it conflicted with what others perceived.

Self-doubt became automatic.

Not because I was confused, but because I had learned that external stability mattered more than internal truth.

Years later, my life changed in a way I could not have anticipated.

I was drugged, assaulted, and then criminalized when I called for help. The narrative constructed around the event did not reflect my lived experience, and I found myself inside systems that reinforced versions of the story I knew internally to be untrue.

But what unsettled me most was not only what happened externally. It was how quickly I turned against myself internally—even with injuries. Even with fragmented memory. Even with a deep bodily knowing that something had been deeply wrong.

My first instinct was not self-protection.

It was self-doubt.

That reflex did not begin there. It had been rehearsed for years.

What the aftermath revealed was not just the impact of a single event, but a pattern that had been forming for decades.

A way of relating to myself that defaulted to questioning my own perception before trusting it. A tendency to defer to external authority over internal experience. A learned habit of minimizing my own reality in order to maintain coherence with others.

The event didn’t create that pattern; it exposed it.

And once I could see it, I began to recognize how often I had abandoned my own knowing in subtle, socially acceptable ways long before anything overtly traumatic occurred.

The breaking point came later, in the professional and legal aftermath that followed.

After 20 years working as a nurse, I was told I would need to submit to long-term monitoring and treatment structures based on a version of events that did not align with what I knew to be true.

And something in me finally stopped complying.

Not dramatically. Not all at once. But decisively. Because I could no longer continue participating in a system where preserving external legitimacy required abandoning my internal reality.

So, I walked away from my career.

Not because I had clarity about what came next, but because I could no longer survive the cost of self-betrayal.

What looked from the outside like collapse was, internally, something else beginning.

Not reinvention.
Not empowerment.
But the slow, unfamiliar process of learning how to stay with myself.

To trust my own experience without immediately outsourcing it. To stop overriding internal knowing in order to preserve external coherence.

I often think now that self-abandonment is not dramatic.

It is quiet. Repetitive. Normalized. It happens in small moments:

When you override discomfort to keep the peace.
When you question what you already know.
When you make yourself smaller to reduce friction.

And over time, those moments accumulate into a life that feels functional on the outside but disconnected on the inside.

What I am learning now is that returning to yourself is not a single decision.

It is a practice of interruption.

Interrupting the reflex to doubt yourself first.
Interrupting the habit of minimizing your experience.
Interrupting the automatic move toward external validation over internal truth.

And slowly, something begins to change

Not dramatically. Not perfectly. But unmistakably.

You begin to recognize your own voice again—not as something to analyze, but something to trust.

What I once thought was strength was often self-abandonment.
What I once thought was stability was often disconnection.

And what I am learning now is that the most fundamental return is not becoming someone new.

It is learning how to stop leaving yourself.

~

If these words spoke to you, check out Romy’s well-loved second article: