There was a period in my life when I trusted everyone's read on me except my own.
If someone thought I was doing well, I was doing well. If someone seemed disappointed, I'd spend the rest of the day running the conversation back, working out what I'd done wrong. I'd built a reasonably accurate model of how other people experienced me. I had almost no idea how I experienced myself.
The internal signal was there.
A low hum underneath things. A sense that something was slightly off, that I was slightly off, that I was running slightly too hot or slightly too empty.
I noticed it the same way you notice background noise: present, persistent, ignored.
I told myself the signal wasn't reliable.
That feelings weren't data. That the only thing worth going on was evidence, what I'd actually done, what people actually said, what results had actually come in.
Internal experience was too volatile.
Too vulnerable to bad days or bad sleep or just being in a mood.
You couldn't build decisions on it.
What I didn't see at the time, and I'm still seeing this, slowly, is that I wasn't being rational.
I was outsourcing. I was replacing one unreliable narrator (myself) with a collection of other unreliable narrators (everyone else) and calling it objectivity.
The man who can read every room he walks into and can't read himself isn't a good reader. He's a dependent one.
I started noticing the pattern a few years ago. Not all at once. More like: I'd catch myself checking someone's face before I knew how I felt about something.
Or I'd realise I had an opinion, but I was waiting to see what someone I respected thought before I let myself have it. Small moments. Habitual ones.
The work, and it is work, I'm not on the other side of this, is learning to treat the internal signal as information rather than noise. Not gospel. Not the only thing that matters. But data. The same way you'd treat any other signal.
It doesn't arrive loudly. It's usually quiet and inconvenient and arrives at moments you'd rather it didn't.
The sense that something isn't right.
That you said yes to something you wanted to say no to.
That you're tired in a way that sleep won't fix.
That you've been performing for so long, you've forgotten what the non-performance version of you sounds like.
I don't think the signal is always right. But I've stopped treating it as automatically wrong.
That's not a big shift on paper. In practice, for men who've spent decades treating their own experience as inadmissible evidence, it's one of the harder things there is.
You already know what you feel.
The question is whether you've given yourself permission to count it.
Cheers
Paul
