“Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
It’s a strange sentence to sit with. Say it slowly and it collapses in on itself, because if the second half is true, the first half can’t be. And yet, in one form or another, most of us have built entire seasons of life on exactly this contradiction. We have trusted things that told us, quite plainly if we had been listening, that they could not be trusted.
We do it with our feelings. We wake up convinced that today is proof nothing will ever change, and we believe it completely, as if a Tuesday morning mood were a reliable prophet. We do it with comparison, letting a stranger’s highlight reel tell us the truth about our own unfinished story. We do it with fear, which has never once given us accurate information about the future and yet somehow keeps getting hired as our advisor.
The unsettling part isn’t that we get lied to. Everyone does. The unsettling part is how willingly we hand these voices the microphone, how rarely we ask them for credentials before we let them shape a decision, a relationship, a whole identity.
Here’s the thing worth noticing: the loudest voice in a room is not the same as the truest one. Anxiety is loud. Shame is loud. The version of you built entirely out of other people’s opinions is loud. None of that volume is evidence.
So what do you do when you can’t trust the narrator in your own head?
You start asking better questions of it. Not “does this feel true,” because feelings are gifted actors, but “has this voice been right before, and where did it actually lead me the last time I followed it.” You start looking for something steadier to measure the noise against, some fixed point that doesn’t rewrite itself depending on your mood or your month. For some of us that fixed point is a person, a community, a practice, a faith, something outside our own head that we return to precisely because it isn’t as easily fooled as we are. Call it whatever fits your language, but everyone needs a place to check the story against, because a mind left to fact check itself will rarely rule against its own headline.
Because here’s the quiet twist: the moment you stop trusting the lying voice is usually the moment you start becoming someone that voice never accounted for. It told you that you’d stay stuck. It told you the worst interpretation was the real one. It told you this was just who you are now. And the day you finally say, out loud or just to yourself, “I don’t believe you anymore,” is the day something in you starts to move again.
So the next time that familiar voice opens with “trust me,” it might be worth pausing long enough to finish its sentence for it.
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