We often have this idea that once we feel certain enough, clear enough, or healed enough, we’ll finally feel ready to do the things we’ve been putting off.
We’ll finally start saying no and set the boundaries we know we need to set. We’ll finally start the healthy habits we’ve been telling ourselves we should have started months ago. We’ll finally begin the creative project we’ve been talking about for years, leave the situation we already know isn’t right for us, or let ourselves experience something new without needing to know exactly how it’s going to turn out.
We imagine that there will eventually be a point where everything inside us clicks into place. We’ll feel confident in our decision. We’ll understand exactly what we want. We’ll trust ourselves without second-guessing. And the fear will have quieted down enough that moving forward feels natural.
But somehow...
That clarity we’re waiting for never really arrives.
We keep thinking that if we give ourselves a little more time to heal, reflect, learn, prepare, or work through whatever is holding us back, we’ll eventually reach that magical point where we feel completely ready. And then we can finally begin.
Except life doesn’t really work that way. There is no version of healing that guarantees you’ll eventually wake up with complete certainty about what to do next—and there is no amount of self-awareness that can tell you exactly how every decision will unfold.
The hard truth is: there will always be things you cannot know until you actually live them.
And this is where I think we can accidentally turn healing, self-awareness, and the desire to make the right choices into another reason to keep waiting.
That’s a mistake I’ve made countless times. And today I want to show you why waiting until you feel completely ready can keep you stuck far longer than you realize.
Let me tell you something that took me years to realize:
The certainty we’re waiting for is often the certainty that comes after we do the thing, not before it.
We tend to imagine that we need to feel confident in our ability to handle something before we can reasonably expect ourselves to do it. But the truth is, confidence often comes from having evidence that we can handle something, and that evidence doesn’t exist until we actually give ourselves the chance to experience it.
I’m not saying we should never prepare ourselves or take the time we genuinely need before making a decision. I’m saying there is a difference between preparing yourself and waiting indefinitely for a feeling of certainty that can only come from experience.
You cannot know what it feels like to set a boundary you have never set before by thinking about it for another six months. You cannot know what it will be like to share your work publicly until you actually let people see it. You cannot know whether you can trust someone with your heart by standing at a distance and trying to calculate every possible way you could get hurt.
At some point, experience has to become part of the equation, because there are things about yourself and about life that you can only discover by living them.
And even while you’re living them, I promise you, you will still have doubts. Your fears will still be there. Your insecurities will still haunt you. There is no magical point in the future where you suddenly become completely clear, completely healed, and completely confident, and from then on, every decision feels easy. You simply become better at moving through the uncertainty as you experience more of life, because every time you do the thing you were afraid to do, you learn a little more about yourself and what you’re capable of.
My experience with writing is a good example.
As I write this, I have 7,729 total subscribers here, 224 of whom are paid. Those numbers fluctuate, of course, but it still means that thousands of people have chosen to keep up with my writing in some way, and hundreds have resonated with it enough to decide they want to support me.
I get incredibly kind messages from people who tell me that something I wrote made them feel seen or understood, and comments from readers who tell me that a particular post reached them at exactly the right time. I feel deeply grateful for that every day.
And I still doubt myself.
Almost every time I show up here, there’s still a voice in my head asking whether what I have to say makes sense, whether anyone will actually care, or whether I’m actually good enough to be doing this.
Those doubts haven’t disappeared just because I now have evidence that people are reading and connecting with what I write. So, if I had waited until I felt completely ready to start writing publicly… I wouldn’t be here at all. I would have been waiting for a version of myself who no longer questioned her own voice, and I’m not sure that version of me would ever have arrived.
My relationship has taught me something similar, although in a completely different way.
Letting someone in has been one of the biggest parts of my healing because abandonment has always been such a deep fear for me. When my relationship began, I was experiencing something safe and secure for the first time, but my mind didn’t immediately know what to do with that. I still had so many fears and insecurities, and there were times when those old protective instincts told me that it wasn’t safe to get too attached, even while my partner was consistently showing me that I was safe with him.
Almost nine years later, those fears can still show up sometimes. I’m still healing. The difference is that I no longer take the presence of fear as evidence that I shouldn’t let myself love someone deeply—or let myself be loved deeply.
I have learned what safety feels like through experiencing it. I have learned that I can be vulnerable and still be okay, that I can become deeply attached to someone without abandoning myself, and that I can allow something beautiful to matter to me without spending every moment preparing for the possibility of losing it.
If I had waited until I was perfectly healed before allowing myself to have a relationship, I would have missed one of the most beautiful parts of my life. I would have missed the experience of being loved in a way that taught me things I could never have learned by simply thinking about love, reading about attachment, or trying to heal every fear before letting anyone close.
Once again, this doesn’t mean you should enter a relationship without considering whether you’re genuinely ready for it. It just means you don’t have to be perfectly healed before you allow yourself to experience love.
The feeling that we’re “not ready yet” is simply another form of overthinking.
We keep turning the decision over in our minds because we believe that if we think about it from enough different angles, eventually we’ll reach the answer that makes everything feel clear. Eventually we’ll finally feel certain enough to move forward.
But the truth is… overthinking rarely gives us the certainty we’re looking for. If anything, it usually gives us more material to think about. And something that has become pretty clear to me is that the answers we’re looking for don’t really lie in our minds—they lie in our intuition.
I’ve had so many moments where I spent weeks or even months overthinking something, going back and forth in my head, trying to figure out what I was supposed to do, and feeling increasingly anxious because I still couldn’t find the clarity I was looking for… And then, almost without fail, when I eventually stopped forcing myself to figure it out and gave myself permission to slow down, I would suddenly feel clear. I would know what I wanted. I would know what felt right. Sometimes the answer had been sitting quietly underneath all that noise the entire time; I just couldn’t hear it while I was trying so hard to think my way to it.
That’s the thing about intuition: it doesn’t usually compete for your attention. It’s quiet. It doesn’t scream over your fears or argue its case for three hours. And when your mind is constantly running through every possible outcome, it’s very easy to mistake the loudest voice for the wisest one.
We have to make space for our intuition if we want to hear it. We have to actually slow down enough to notice what we feel beneath all the thinking.
This is something I wrote about at length in my Intuition Workbook.
So if you’ve been in that anxious, confusing place lately, try to gently ask yourself: have I been making enough space for my intuition? Have I been giving myself enough quiet to actually hear what I already know, instead of constantly thinking my way around it?
Because sometimes, you’re not missing the answer. You’re just thinking so loudly that you can’t hear yourself anymore.
Sometimes we genuinely need time. Sometimes there are things we need to understand, wounds we need to tend to, or circumstances we need to change before we can take the next step in a healthy way. I don’t think the answer is to force ourselves forward every time we feel afraid.
But if you have been waiting for months or years to finally feel ready, and the finish line keeps moving further away… it might be worth asking whether you are actually waiting for something that can only be found through experience.
And maybe this is the permission you’ve been waiting for: you are allowed to begin before you feel completely ready.
You are allowed to make the decision while you still have some doubts. You are allowed to start the thing while a part of you is still wondering whether you’re good enough. You are allowed to let someone love you while you’re still learning how to receive it.
You will keep healing as you live. You will keep learning yourself through the choices you make, the experiences you have, the people you meet, the things that work out and the things that don’t. You will discover that some things you were afraid of weren’t as frightening as you imagined, while other things will teach you that you need to choose differently next time. That is part of being alive.
You don’t need to wait until you become a version of yourself who never doubts, never gets scared, and always knows what to do… Because that person does not even exist.
So take the next step when you can. Let it be imperfect. Let yourself be a little scared.
You might be surprised by how much clarity finds you once you stop waiting for it to arrive first.
Thank you for reading 🫶🏼
If my words resonated with you, here are a few more posts you might enjoy:
And if this post made you curious about getting a little closer to your own intuition, my Intuition Workbook is available exclusively to paid subscribers. It’s one of the resources I’m most proud of creating here, and it goes much deeper into learning how to recognize your intuition, separate it from fear, and actually trust what you’re picking up on.
Paid subscribers also get full access to all my posts, like…
I’m currently offering 25% off annual subscriptions if you’d like to join. I’d be very happy to have you here 🤍
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See you soon!
With love,
Patricia
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