TODAY, SELF-DOUBT CAME BACK

Today, self-doubt visited me.

I’m not going to dress it up or pretend I’m so healed that certain emotions never find their way back to me.

They do.

I am still human.

I am still a spiritual being living a human experience, and sometimes old feelings surface when life begins asking you to become someone you have never been before.

Today was one of those days.

For the first time in over a year, I felt self-doubt trying to creep back in.

And instead of pretending it wasn’t there, I sat with it.

I asked myself:

Why are you here?

Why now?

What has changed?

And I already knew the answer.

I am in transition.

I am trying to elevate.

I am looking at changing the work I have known for years.

I am stepping deeper into my creativity, my advocacy, my writing, my business, and the version of myself I have been building toward.

And somewhere inside of that transition, familiarity tried to call me back.

Absolutely not.

I refuse to go backward simply because backward feels familiar.

That is one thing healing has taught me very clearly.

Familiar does not mean aligned.

Sometimes the old version of you becomes uncomfortable when the new version starts taking up more space.

Sometimes self-doubt does not appear because you are making the wrong decision.

Sometimes it appears because you are standing at the edge of something unfamiliar.

And unfamiliarity can wake up old survival responses.

Years ago, I may have entertained that voice.

I may have questioned myself for days.

I may have overthought everything.

I may have allowed fear to convince me that perhaps I should stay where I was because at least I understood that version of my life.

But I know myself differently now.

I have a rule about what I consciously walk away from:

I do not go back and renegotiate with it.

Once I have truly detached from something, I am done.

That applies to people.

Patterns.

Versions of myself.

And today, it applied to self-doubt.

I recognized the feeling, but I also recognized that it no longer had authority over me.

That is what healing has started to look like in my life.

Not never feeling anything uncomfortable again.

But knowing what to do when it comes.

Sometimes I kickbox.

Sometimes I meditate.

Sometimes I write poetry.

Sometimes I draw.

Sometimes I simply become still enough to listen to myself without judging what I hear.

I have learned that there is a difference between feeling an emotion and becoming the emotion.

I can feel self-doubt without becoming doubtful of who I am.

I can feel fear without allowing fear to choose my future.

I can feel uncertainty without running back to what is familiar.

That is where the Law of Perpetual Transmutation of Energy becomes very real to me.

Energy does not have to remain in the form in which it arrives.

I can take the energy of fear and move my body.

I can take self-doubt and turn it into art.

I can take uncertainty and turn it into questions.

I can take anxiety about change and turn it into preparation.

I can take an old emotion and refuse to give it an old response.

That, to me, is alchemy.

Not pretending darkness does not exist.

Knowing what to do with it when it appears.

Today also reminded me of the Law of Rhythm.

Life moves in cycles.

Healing does too.

Sometimes something you thought you were finished with circles back around.

But I no longer automatically interpret that as regression.

I look at my response.

That tells me how much I have changed.

Maybe years ago self-doubt could have taken me out for months.

Today, I recognized it almost immediately.

I understood its origin.

I allowed myself to feel it.

And then I moved the energy.

That is growth.

That is wisdom.

That is mastery.

Mastery is not becoming untouchable.

Mastery is being touched by an old feeling without allowing it to pull you back into an old identity.

And today, I had to remind myself of something:

I have worked too hard to become this version of myself to crawl back into familiarity simply because the future is unfamiliar.

No.

I would rather walk trembling into the unknown than confidently return to a version of myself I already outgrew.

So yes, today I was vulnerable.

Today I doubted myself for a moment.

Today something old knocked.

But the difference is this:

I answered the door as the woman I am now.

And she does not live there anymore.

Self-doubt may still remember the address.

But familiarity no longer feels like home.

SELF-DOUBT

Self-doubt knocked, but I knew that sound,

An old dead fear still hanging around.

I let it speak, then let it leave—

I’ve come too far to disbelieve.

What once had power can’t stay in me;

I healed the lock, I hold the key.

-Raquel McKenzie-