The past month has been disruptive on a deep level for me. I am very proud that I know who I am. It’s one of the most obvious things about me that everyone sees – I’m self-possessed, I know my own mind and even when I’m scared, I still speak my truth. And yet, this past month, I’ve been humbled by all that I didn’t know about myself – or rather, all that others know that I refused to believe.

For a long time I’ve carried deep doubts about my intelligence. Whether those doubts were inspired by imposter syndrome or were a symtom of it, I spent an inordinate amoutn of time perfecting things that never needed perfection while beating myself up for those moments where I knew I had not done my due diligence. I always thought that becasue I can see patterns quickly that I was skipping steps that others were taking. I never felt like I could meet my own standards – which then made me question my judgment, which others took advantage of.

This week I learned that much of what has been holding me back intellectually is an overcrowded “working memory”. My brain has been so overwhelmed with working out 20 different ways to keep myself safe in any given situation, that I have limited memory available to complete the tasks in front of me or retain useless information that others seem to store so easily. And when I chose to see that my intellect didn’t suffer from imposter syndrome, but rather had more than its fair share of stress hormones and disruptive memories to fend off, I started to regain some of my confidence again. And when I started to remember my value as a thinking woman again, I started to realize just how easily others made me question it.

My training as an attorney has fine tuned my ability to see trouble on the horizon. We’re trained to look for problems, holes that haven’t been considered, gaps between intentions and words. So when I saw problems, I rightfully raised the alarm bells. Too often in my career the response was “you’re just too sensitive” or “you’re overreacting”. Whether it was becasue I was a woman or an empath or a Latina, I’ll never really know, but I know that each and every time I took it personally. And yet time and again, as I and others have learned the hard way – I was also usually right to have been concerned.

This week I learned just how much of my life has been influenced both by trauma and the skills I’ve developed to cope with that trauma. I’ve pushed most of my healing into healing others, allowing others to see through my works how they are not alone in their wounds or in their resilience. Too often, I was alone and had to develop an early warning system to keep myself safe, to see ten steps ahead, to understand the consequences of every single action or inaction. To stay safe, I had ot learn how to recognize unspoken communication, how to sense a change of mood in the air. That this is a skillset earned from trauma is undeniable, but that doesn’t lessen the importance of the intuition I’ve developed to keep me and others safe.

I had to listen this week about how important it was that I have come this far, through all of that trauma, to stand here and continue to live and declare my truth. It’s important that I developed the skills of a heart-centered leader because I had to stitch my broken heart back together after people and systems kept tearing it apart. It’s important that I stand here today as evidence that we can go thorugh the worst that life has to offer and that we’re as resilient as the diamonds that form in the earth. We are magnificent gems of humanity that deserve to be seen, heard and respected.

But first, we have to choose ourselves. We have to choose to change the stories of our past from ones of sorrow and woe, to ones of triump and redemption. We aren’t here by accident. We aren’t some fluke of nature. We are the strong ones who survived, who have something valuable to give. We are the core of humanity that has been through it all and knows what needs to change in our world for the better.

None of us want others to go through what we went through and so it’s critical that we choose to tell the stories of our survival, the stories where the duty to our higher selves mattered more than any written law or religious tenent. We need to overcome the temptations of indecision and declare for the world Who We Really Are.

The Fantastical Tarot is one of the sharpest, meanest decks I have in my possession, one of my favorites. Brutal in its honesty, this deck offers the kick in the pants we need to get away from old patterns and instead boldly grasp for a new future.