Last week I caught myself doing something I’ve done approximately ten thousand times in my life: asking a question I already knew the answer to. Not because I needed information, I had plenty of that. Not because I was confused, I just kind of wanted someone else to say it first.
This is one of the stranger things we do to ourselves. We spend years getting better at knowing what we like, what we want, what feels wrong, what feels right, what makes us feel alive and what makes us want to crawl out of our own skin, and then the second an actual decision needs making, we’re suddenly convening a small-scale UN summit in the group chat. What do you think, would you do this, am I being unreasonable, does this make sense, should I, would you, just tell me what you would do. And then, to really prove we’ve learned nothing, we ask six different people the same question and get vaguely offended when we receive six different answers.
Which is frankly rude of the universe. Anyways.
Most of the time we’re not actually looking for an answer, we’re looking for relief: somebody else to absorb a little of the risk, to nod along enthusiastically enough that it starts to feel less terrifying to believe we came up with this ourselves. It’s also an incredibly convenient way to avoid rejection. We want permission, reassurance, a witness. Occasionally, if we’re being honest, we want plausible deniability. Because there’s something uniquely uncomfortable about deciding when you know there’s no committee coming to save you if it goes badly. If everyone agrees, the decision was sensible. If everyone disagrees and you do it anyway, at least you were warned. But when you know what you want and act on it without asking anybody else what they think, you have to own the whole enchilada.
But this is where it gets interesting. (Or spicy, if we’re sticking with the Mexican food reference. Shit, now I’m hungry.)
I’ve been thinking about the piece I published the other day about weird women, that line about your strange obsessions being a map. And you better bet your booty I believe it. Your weird little interests are clues. Your recurring tastes are clues. The things you keep choosing, decade after decade, even when you try very hard to become someone more sensible, more practical, more normal, more appropriate, are clues. The type of clothes are data. The rabbit holes are data. The books you keep rereading are data. The fact that you’d happily spend three hours in a museum while everyone else is ready to leave (🙋🏼♀️), that’s data, too. Even the thing you keep wanting, despite having a very convincing explanation for why you shouldn’t want it, is definitely data.
We spend a surprising amount of energy collecting evidence about everyone else and startlingly little noticing the evidence our own lives have been leaving behind for years. And then, once we finally notice the pattern, we do something very funny: We ask somebody else what they think. We find the map and immediately hand it to another person and say, okay, but where should I go?
That’s insane.
This is the part nobody really talks about, that recognizing yourself and trusting yourself are two completely different skills. One is observational, but the other can be terrifying. Because once you actually know what you like, what you want, what matters to you, and what no longer fits, the problem stops being discovery. Now you have to do something with the information.
You might have to admit the apartment you’ve spent five years making “work” for you actually makes you miserable. That the career you worked so hard to build doesn’t excite you anymore. That the relationship everyone thinks is great has been making you feel like a shell of yourself. That you want more money. That you don’t want the life you were taught to want. That your version of a beautiful life is considerably stranger than the one you’ve been performing.
Sound familiar? Yeah… I don’t make the rules, I just notice them.
And then you have to make a decision, which is where the questions begin. Is this reasonable, am I being dramatic, what would you do, is this a bad idea, should I wait, maybe next year, maybe when things calm down, maybe when I have more money, maybe when everyone else agrees this makes sense. We’re very good at turning a decision we’re afraid to make into a research project. We call it gathering information. Sometimes it is. But oftentimes it’s just a better term for stalling, and I say that with love because I’m extremely familiar with the behavior.
Here’s another thing that gets me. How wild is it that we can feel embarrassed about something before we’ve even done it? We’re out here pre-cringing. Pre-rejecting our own ideas before we’ve given them one single chance to fully exist, imagining the judgment, writing the mean comment ourselves, and then acting hurt about it. MY DUDE. Noooooo.
But I think that’s the real reason for the polling, honestly. Not because we need actually more data, but because if six people co-sign it first, it can’t be embarrassing anymore. It’s been ratified.
That’s the moment when asking for another perspective stops being useful and starts becoming a way of avoiding your own. I don’t think the problem for most intelligent women is that we don’t know ourselves, I think a lot of us know ourselves extraordinarily well, we just don’t always trust what we know when the answer is inconvenient.
We trust our own taste when we’re choosing a couch. We trust our own judgment when we’re evaluating someone else’s business. We trust our own intelligence when we’re solving a problem at work. We can spot bullshit from a mile away when it belongs to somebody else. And then our own life comes up and suddenly we’d love seven additional opinions and 10 business days before proceeding. Bitch, please. You know.
Because knowing yourself changes the nature of the problem. Once you see yourself clearly, you become responsible for what you see, and that’s the part we spend a lot of energy trying to avoid. It’s easier to say “I don’t know what I want” than it is to say “I know exactly what I want and I’m scared that wanting it will require me to change something.” It’s easier to say “I’m confused” than it is to say “I know the answer and I don’t like what it means.” It’s easier to keep asking the group chat than to sit quietly long enough to hear yourself.
And sometimes the answer isn’t even complicated. Sometimes it’s just yes, or no, or leave, or stay, or buy the thing, or don’t. You just don’t particularly enjoy the consequences of knowing, which is not the same thing as being confused.
I think this is one of the things we’ve gotten very good at as modern adults: outsourcing authority while calling it collaboration. We ask everybody what they think, read twelve articles, make a pros-and-cons list, consult a podcast, our astrology, our therapist, our mother, the actual weather. And eventually we’ve surrounded the original question with so much information that we can no longer hear the person who asked it. Which is usually us.
I don’t think the answer is to stop asking other people for advice. Other people can be brilliant, they can see things we can’t, and sometimes we genuinely need information, perspective, correction, or a good hard reality check. The point isn’t that you should never ask, it’s knowing when you’re asking because you need information and when you’re asking because you’re hoping somebody else will hand you permission to trust yourself. Those are very different questions, and only one of them makes you more informed.
Maybe that’s the next stage of self-authorship. Not just figuring out who you are, not just noticing the pattern, not just identifying the things you love and want and keep coming back to, but becoming capable of hearing yourself without immediately handing the microphone to somebody else. Because eventually the decision has to belong to somebody, and that somebody should be you.
There’s a reason I’ve become so interested in the space between knowing and trusting. I’ve been building something around exactly that question. Not another place to collect advice, not another digital container where somebody tells you you’re doing great and hands you a list of affirmations you’ll read once and forget exists. Something much closer to the opposite, actually: a place to bring the question before you’ve polished it into something reasonable, untangle what you actually mean, get pushed back on when you’re asking the wrong one, told when you’ve already answered yourself, and helped separate fear from intuition, noise from signal, and genuine uncertainty from the very human urge to hear the answer one more time from somebody else.
More on Friday.
For now, next time you catch yourself asking the same question for the fourth time, stop and ask a different one instead: What answer am I hoping somebody gives me, and more importantly, what do I already know?
About the Author
I’m Sara — artist, creative director, metalhead, art history dork, raging feminist, and founder of Double Kick.
I write about art, beauty, identity, feminism, and the ongoing project of building a life that actually fits — not just the bullshit you were handed.
If that sounds like your particular type of unhinged fun, welcome.
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