I want to share with you a lesson I just learned about trusting my intuition, but first, I want to briefly write about my experiences with others who have said that I don’t know what I am talking about and question my intelligence.

Throughout my life, I have been labeled “sick” and “mentally ill.” That label has made it hard for me to trust in my intelligence. Even when I proved I was right, some people continued to doubt that I knew anything. That has caused much self-hate and insecurity in trusting my abilities.

I do have many mental health issues, and that in itself causes me to doubt my intelligence. Among several other things, I am diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which makes me prone to impulsivity, impatience, and frustration, and I can quickly become angry.

Here is the situation. I brought my laptop to a shop because it was extremely slow and constantly freezing on me. I left it with them to try to figure out what the problem was. The next day, they called me and said I had very little storage and RAM for what I was using the laptop for, which was why it was slow and giving me issues. Upon opening it up, they also said installing more RAM or storage was impossible. I bought the laptop at Walmart, only paying $175 for it, so I should have expected it would be a problem. The shop recommended a computer that they trust, with 16 GB of RAM and 5 hundred and something storage, compared to the 4 GB of RAM and only 56 GB of storage. It was an MSI. Although it cost me $600, I bought it because I knew that I needed a better laptop for what I needed.

I had to wait two weeks for it to be delivered to the shop, and it was delivered two days ago. I first noticed an error message when trying to open OneDrive, but I reinstalled OneDrive, and everything was good. This morning was my last straw—the trackpad stopped working. I talked to my mom, and she said to call the shop. The shop was closed until Monday, and I have zero patience and couldn’t wait three days to get this fixed. I HAD to get it fixed now. I told her that I was going to reset the laptop and reinstall Windows. She gave me a look that said, “Be careful,” and told me not to tell the shop I did that if something went wrong.

I returned to my room and sat there, questioning whether this was the right thing to do and if I knew how to do it correctly. However, I wasn’t about to wait. My lack of patience would have made the weekend miserable. So, I was sure I knew how to do it, even though I am not a computer-informed person, and I went ahead and did it. I had difficulty being patient with it, which took about an hour and a half.

However, I got excited when I realized the keyboard lit up when I touched the trackpad, so I was pretty sure it was fixing the problem. Sure enough, it did. The laptop was working perfectly, and I have had no other issues. I know that my mom didn’t trust my thought process, which, in turn, caused me to doubt my own intuition. Yet even she suggested I write a blog post about trusting my intuition.

This was a lesson for me. I need to believe in myself. I tell myself all the time when I am trying to figure something out that I am stupid and can’t figure anything out. I once stayed up all night trying to figure out how to jailbreak my PSP after it had already been jailbroken and I made a careless mistake and undid all of it. I wasn’t going to sleep until I learned how to do it, and it took all night!

Even with that prior experience, I still had negative self-talk about my ability to figure things out. There have been countless times when I doubted myself yet ended up figuring it out. Yet, I still have that nagging voice, doubting myself and thinking I am stupid. This is just one more experience to add, and I question if I will continue to have that negative self-talk the next time I need to figure something out.

How many times will it take before I no longer doubt myself, actually believing that I might know what I am talking about and am smart enough to figure it out? I wonder if anyone who reads this, struggles with this same negative self-talk. Can anyone relate to this?