The Cost of Knowing and Not Listening

Years ago I sat in a room with a group of friends. Someone asked what our futures would look like. I went into detail. Specific detail. Everything — what I would build, who I would become, how my life would unfold. I could see it as clearly as I can see my own hands.

Someone in that room called me crazy. Said there was no way I could know all of that.

Everything I described came true. Every single thing.

And I have been living with that split ever since — the part of me that knows, and the part of me that still needs to prove I am not crazy for knowing. I have tried to heal it. Forget it. I even wrote about it. But it keeps returning — not as a wound, I think, but as a reminder. You are not crazy. You do see the bigger picture. Stop pretending otherwise.

The only time I ever stopped needing that reminder — even briefly — was in the Amazon jungle in Peru. Dry season. I made it rain. I cannot fully explain what happened except to say I stopped being Angela for a few minutes. I became something else. Something endless, ancient, and timeless. The power I felt inside and outside my body was something I have never had adequate words for. The resort staff came running. Their guide pointed at me. Her. She did this. And for the first time in my life I felt completely seen and completely safe in the same moment.

That was not passion. That was fire.

Here is the difference as I understand it now: passion is long lasting. It is the deep current underneath everything — the soul purpose that does not leave you no matter how many rooms you walk out of. Fire is instant. It is what ignites the current. It is the moment the thing you are made of meets the world and something erupts. All of it landing in what Carl Jung called the numinous. Something beyond the ordinary that you cannot un-know once you have felt it.

I have spent years wanting that experience every single day.

What I understand now is that the split — the one that started in that room when someone called me crazy — is what kept me from it. Because the split is where you learn to override yourself. To bring your knowing to the room and let the room decide. To wait for permission from people who cannot see what you can see.

Here is what that has cost me every time I have ignored my own knowing: money, time, mental clarity, and the particular exhaustion of watching yourself repeat a pattern you already recognized. Not sometimes. Every time.

You know this feeling. Not because you are a seer or any particular thing. But because you are a woman who has been taught since birth that her inner knowing is suspect. Too emotional. Too much. Not rational enough to act on.

So you talk yourself out of it. And then you wonder why nothing quite fits.

Your knowing is not crazy. It has simply been in rooms that were not ready for it.

The fire is not gone. You have just been spending it in the wrong places.

What would it cost you to stop needing the room’s permission?

If this resonated, I just started a YouTube channel for women who are done pretending too. Never Retiring. Come find me there

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