The Cost of Knowing

Two days ago, life took a ninety degree turn.

There’s a kind of knowing I’ve carried my whole life. Even when I pretended I didn’t. I wouldn’t call it divine, exactly, not in the way people mean when they say that word. There was no light or thunder or any of the drama religion seems to require. But it’s always been there, beating beneath the surface. Not a voice, not even a feeling, but a kind of internal change. A weight moving slightly to one side. A tightening in the chest. A moment where I realize that, despite everything I’m pretending to consider, I already know. I knew before the conversation started. Before the plan was made. Before the question was even asked. And that knowing never speaks in reasons. It doesn’t offer data or consensus. It just exists, firm and silent, waiting to be followed or ignored.

I’ve learned, slowly and at great cost, is that ignoring it doesn’t make it go away. It just makes everything more difficult. It makes you live out someone else’s dream while your own watches from the corner, waiting for you to come back. You end up with a life full of things that look fine but feel wrong, and you don’t know how to explain what’s missing because what’s missing isn’t something that can be found, it’s something you buried. You can kill off your own knowing just by deferring it long enough. It doesn’t scream when it dies. It just goes still. And you keep living, and you pretend it is normal, and you wonder why you feel so far from yourself all the time.

Some people call it intuition. Some call it God. I don’t know that it needs a name or a label. In fact, I think the moment you label it, you start to lose it. You start building ideas around it. Rules. Expectations. Systems. You try to explain it to other people, and in doing so, you talk yourself out of it. It’s not explainable. It never was. It’s just something you either choose to trust or you don’t. And when you don’t, you feel it. You feel it in the delay. In the hesitation. In the anxiety that shows up after you say yes when you should have said no. In the grief that leaks into your voice when you try to describe the thing you’ve committed to, even though you already know it isn’t yours.

I think in many ways, we’ve all been trained out of it. From an early age, we’re taught to defer to logic, to authority, to consensus. To behave. To plan. To explain ourselves. And little by little, we learn to check that internal signal against external expectations. And if they don’t match, we assume the signal is wrong. We doubt it. We override it. We let someone else’s confidence be louder than our discomfort. And at first it’s small, a relationship that doesn’t quite feel right, a job that’s slightly off, a version of yourself that’s a little too polished to be true. But then years pass. And you wake up and realize you’ve built a life around someone else’s definition of sense. You’ve surrounded yourself with choices that make perfect sense to everyone except you.

I don’t think the goal is to get back to that knowing. I am not sure it never left. It’s still in there, somewhere under the debris. It shows up in the way your body reacts to certain people, certain places, certain conversations. It shows up in the impulse to leave a room before you can justify it. In the silence that follows a fake laugh. In the moment you realize you’ve been performing so long you don’t remember what it feels like to mean something. That’s the doorway. Right there. Not some epiphany. Not some breakthrough. Just the choice to stop pretending you don’t know what you’ve always known.

I don’t care what you call it. Call it instinct. Call it spirit. Call it the nervous system. Call it God, if that word still means something to you. But understand this, it’s not waiting to be discovered. It’s waiting to be remembered. And when you do remember, when you follow it, even once, it doesn’t reward you with ease. It rewards you with congruence. With alignment. With the quiet sense that, for once, your life is not contradicting itself. That you are not a thousand different versions of yourself negotiating every place you enter. That you are not living a life that impresses people while quietly dismantling you.

That’s what’s been stolen. Not the divine, but the permission to trust it. And the truth is, you don’t need permission. You just need to listen. Not to me. Not to them. To you. The you before the rules. Before the filters. Before the edits. The one who knew, without needing to say why.

Twenty hours ago, my life was different.

Monumentally different. Not just in theory, not just a shift in perspective or a new insight. I mean two things happened, and they changed everything that comes next. The kind of change that doesn’t knock, doesn’t schedule itself, doesn’t ask if you’re ready. It just is. A sentence, a phone call, a look, an email, doesn’t matter the form. The point is, it shows up, and you know, in an instant, that something irreversible just occurred.

And in that instant, I knew what to do.

Not intellectually. Not step-by-step. Not with confidence or certainty or some sense of triumph. Just knowing. The kind that bypasses thought entirely. It was there before I had the words to describe it. It didn’t explain itself. It didn’t need to. It just was. A decision, fully formed, lodged inside. Clear. Whole. True.

But then I got in the car.

And in the span of a thirty-minute drive, I unraveled it. Not because the knowing changed, but because I did. Because the longer I sat with it, the more room I gave to the other voices. Ego. Fear. Doubt. The inner committee, always well-meaning, always prepared with files and evidence and charts. “Let’s be reasonable,” they say. “Let’s wait and see. Let’s not overreact. Let’s consider the consequences.”

And just like that, I’d talked myself out of truth.

That’s not confusion. That’s refusal. And it has a cost. Every time I’ve ignored what I knew, I paid for it. Slowly, sometimes invisibly. A little less energy. A little more self-doubt. A little less aliveness. A day that feels off for no reason. A decision I can’t quite stand behind. A version of myself I can’t quite believe in.

This isn’t about writing. Though writing is just one of the places the voice speaks clearly, when I allow. But it shows up everywhere. In who I call. In what I say no to. In the moment I pause before entering a room that doesn’t feel like mine. It’s not dramatic. It’s not mystical. It’s just real. It's in my body before it’s in my head. And most of the time, I hear it. I just don’t always want to do what it tells me.

Not because it’s wrong. Because it’s clear.

And clarity has consequences. Knowing demands movement. It puts something in your hands and says, you, not someday, you now. And if you’re not ready for that, you’ll call it confusion. You’ll call it pressure. You’ll build time around it. But really, you're just stalling. You’re afraid of what obeying that voice will cost you.

And it will cost you. It always does.

But the cost of ignoring it is worse.

That cost is a thousand tiny betrayals. It’s a life that looks fine but feels off. It’s waking up every day a little further from yourself. It’s waiting for clarity to show up in a form that won’t scare you. It’s calling yourself indecisive when you’re just unwilling to be honest.

And I’ve done that long enough.

This isn’t about belief. This isn’t about faith. This isn’t about God in the sky or a system to subscribe to. This is about the fact that I already know. And the only real decision is whether I’m going to follow it, or keep pretending I need more time.

So this time, I don’t think I’ll perform the debate.

I won’t drown it in process.

I won’t pretend not to hear.

I listen.

And I act.

Because whatever that voice is, intuition, God, the One, the real me, it has never lied to me.

Only waited.