Three years ago, I slipped off my wedding band and started sleeping alone in a king-size bed.
After three decades of yanking the covers over my lifeless marriage, I now have the whole bed to myself and a morning routine to die for.
My trusty coffeemaker (a post-divorce splurge) goes off automatically at 7 and by 7:10 I’m back in bed with a fresh cup of java and I’ll stay there until 9 or 10 when I hop up for work.
Sometimes I’m writing. Sometimes I’m reading or meditating. But always I’m content — until that pesky little voice starts turning up the gas to see if I’ll toss a match.
You might call her your inner critic. I call her Marcia, after my ex-mother-in-law, since they both insist, I’m the problem.
“Oh, hey there. Alone again? When are you going to stop pretending you want this? Why do you keep acting like you’re choosing this? Why would anyone choose this? Nobody wants this.”
Unfortunately, she’s not the only one who’s questioning me.
Inquiring minds want to know…
If it isn’t the first question out of people’s mouths, it’s always the second:
Are you seeing anyone? Have you started dating yet? Do you think you’ll ever get married again?
Clearly, I have no choice but to doubt my own reality. I mean, is it even possible to feel content when I’m no longer chasing the cultural requirement to be “chosen”?
And there’s the rub, right?
For self-aware women, the greatest barrier to a better future isn’t a lack of vision — it’s the terror of going off script, even when we’re no longer right for the part.
We want a better story about our lives but won’t betray ourselves to write one.
We’re too committed to truth to practice internal perjury.
Too emotionally intelligent for toxic positivity
Too familiar with manipulation to risk self-deception.
You aren’t questioning your past; you are questioning your present. You want sovereignty, but you need it come with coherence.
Am I settling for the Zonk Prize?
When I was in 7th grade, I discovered the game show “Let’s Make a Deal” where a bouncy contestant is offered a choice: Keep what’s behind Door #1 or trade it for whatever’s behind Door #2.
Sometimes the trade turns out brilliant. And sometimes you get the Zonk — the humiliating “prize.”
I’m convinced this is where my ruminating got its start.
Is this what I did? Did I make the wrong deal? Did I trade in the marriage, health insurance and security behind Door Number 1 for the coffee in bed Zonk deal behind Door Number 2?
And just like that, I’m second guessing my reality and misremembering events. I’m lost in a tug of war between trusting my real contentment and believing the bitchy voice inside me who’s arguing it’s all some kind of trick.
It’s no wonder I crave quiet mornings in bed.
"This is what it means to rest in silence. Because this is when all those voices, those ideas and stories we wrestle with inside us, the ones that keep us up at night and lead us to believe we aren't worthy of love, or of anything good — this is when the whole clamorous riot goes mute. This is when we understand what freedom is. The silence that returns us to love."
Why This Happens: Your Internal Authority Structure Has a Glitch
How can you be this emotionally intelligent and still get bullied by the “Marcia” in your head? Because your internal authority structure has been trained to prioritize safety over peace..
Here are three reasons why your analytical mind keeps pulling you back into the tug-of-war:
1. You Were Trained to Provide a Bulletproof Deposition
High-functioning women are often the ones holding the families, the businesses, and the complicated schedules together. You’ve learned that to be taken seriously, your decisions must be defensible.
The Trap: You can’t just choose coffee in bed; without being able to explain why it’s a worthy choice to anyone who asks (even when that person is you). Since you can’t quantify the value of solitude factually, your mind treats your contentment as a consolation rather than the hard-won reality it actually is.
2. You Are Mistaking Vigilance for Wisdom
Vigilance is a function of the fight-or-flight sympathetic nervous system. It’s our biological factory setting—we are born wired to scan for threats in order to survive.
The Trap: Your mind thinks that if it stops questioning, it’s being naive — which sounds insulting and the exact opposite of the woman you’re becoming. It assumes that inner peace isn’t a reliable safety signal. It second-guesses every thought, convinced that if you stop analyzing for even a second, you’ll be blindsided by a mistake you should have seen coming.
3. Your Body Knows the Verdict, but Your Mind Won’t Rest Its Case
Your body registers truth while your mind is still building its argument. Relief after leaving a difficult relationship. Calm in a quieter life. Wholeness after years of living fractured. Pleasure in your own company.
The Trap: Your body has already reached a verdict, but your mind is still collecting evidence. As Einstein put it, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” The analytical mind that built the loop cannot be the same tool that breaks you out of it.
Analytical thinking (masculine/linear) is great for solving problems, but lousy at knowing what’s true for you.
Embodiment (feminine/iterative) is great at knowing what’s true for you, but lousy at making a bulletproof case for it.
The Surprisingly Simple Antidote to Gaslighting Yourself
In 1817, philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge coined a phrase to describe what happens when we temporarily set aside logic to enjoy a story.
He called it The Willing Suspension of Disbelief — a willed, conscious choice he described as “poetic faith.”
He was talking about poetry.
I’m talking about a practice that can change your life.
For decades, you’ve been trapped in a cycle of doubt — analyzing everything and mentally overriding your own joy.
Suspension of disbelief breaks the stalemate by offering something more helpful: a temporary commitment to a new belief instead of more wrestling with unanswerable questions.
It’s a conscious decision to let your body participate in truth-testing.
"Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Here’s What Changes When You’re Willing Suspend Disbelief:
You learn to live intelligently with uncertainty.
You stop waiting for absolute proof before allowing yourself to trust your own experience. Instead, you gather evidence through living. You make decisions. You take actions. You discover through embodiment what analysis could never prove. This is liberation.
You exit the analysis loop faster.
The old pattern—analyzing, doubting, analyzing more, doubting harder—doesn’t own you anymore. When you notice the loop starting, you have a tool. You pause. You name what’s happening. You choose suspension instead of continuation. You move forward with a plan.
You replace self-doubt with self-trust.
Your mind stops being the only voice in the room. Your body gets a vote. Your intuition counts. Your gut wisdom matters. When these multiple forms of knowing agree, you become more aligned and able to trust what you feel to be true.
You strengthen personal agency.
You stop waiting for the right answer to arrive from outside yourself. You realize: there is no external authority who will tell you what’s true for your life. There never was. You begin to experience the freedom that comes when you stop doing what you’re “supposed to do” and have the audacity to want what you actually want.
You respect your lived experience.
Your body’s signals matter. Your gut intuition matters. Your peace matters. The quiet joy you feel in your own company is evidence. The relief when you stop performing is evidence. The coherence you feel when you make a decision from your whole self—not just your intellect—is the most reliable evidence you have.
3 Reasons Why It Works:
It Lowers the Stakes: You aren’t “reprogramming” yourself or signing up for surgery; you’re merely presenting a reasonable possibility.
It’s Intellectually Honest: You aren’t “tricking” yourself because you are admitting you’re doing it. You’re saying, “I know I have this old conditioning, but I’m choosing to see what happens if I ignore it for a moment.”
It Supports Integration: When you stop forcing yourself to choose between logic and intuition, something unexpected happens: You start to feel whole
The Willing Suspension of Disbelief: Here’s Your 4-Step Practice to Trust What’s True
STEP 1 — Name the looping thought.
What is the question your mind is trying to settle?
________________________________________________________________________________________
(Example: "I'm trying to figure out if I'm actually happy alone or if I'm trying to talk myself into it.")
STEP 2 — Acknowledge the limit of analysis.
Ask yourself honestly: Is there any amount of thinking that will resolve this? If you've been circling this thought for days, weeks, or years — the answer is probably no.
Your mind has done everything it can. This is not a failure of intelligence. It's the limit of analysis.
☐ Yes (write it): __________________________________________________________________
☐ No
STEP 3 — Suspend. Reframe. Neutralize.
First, instead of debating an unanswerable question, offer your mind a new possibility to consider.
I am willing to consider the possibility that ________________________________________.
(Example: "I am willing to consider the possibility that I'm telling the truth about the life I want right now.")
Next, take the drama out of your statement by neutralizing it with two true, grounding statements. Then add your possibility as a third.
"The coffee is warm. The house is quiet. I’m willing to consider the possibility that I'm telling the truth about the life I want right now."
"It's raining outside. There are birds at the feeder. I’m willing to consider the possibility that my childhood religion isn't a match for my spiritual growth anymore."
STEP 4 — Ask the only question that matters.
Take your focus off your thoughts. Ask yourself instead:
What is the feeling I'm experiencing right now?
Is it in line with who I'm becoming?
When you become less obsessed with dissecting your thoughts you can be more obsessed with who you're becoming.
At some point, a thoughtful woman must stop cross-examining her life and trust the evidence she’s gathered from living it.
Warmly,
