learning to trust myself

i've learned some important lessons this year+ since i got diagnosed. perhaps the most important i haven't quite internalized yet. but i'm working on it. like many people i have trouble of with trusting myself. people in my life have taught me that i can/should not. my ex taught me this more clearly than anyone else i've dealt with. unfortunately his lesson has stuck with me, reiterated by other people for almost 20 years.

c. taught me this lesson in ways that are insidious and difficult to overcome. he told me that feelings were stupid. he told me that education was pointless. but really the lesson was one learned not from what he said, but from the experiences of our relationship. he taught me not to trust myself, because i stupidly trusted him, and every time he did something that proved he wasn't trustworthy, i learned more and more that i could not trust my own feelings. that i should not trust myself to know. and through the years these feelings have been reinforced in ways i can hardly explain. every time i trusted someone who turned out to be not trustworthy, or who did something not trustworthy, it again reinforced those feelings. on the occasions when i trusted people that followed through, i always attributed that to THEM. i had managed to find a trustworthy person, but that, that was because they really were trustworthy. my instincts still were in question.

in all this, i realized that i have to actually START to trust my own instincts. most of the people i trust are trustworthy. my friends that i really trusted have stood by me. some friends have turned out to be better friends than i expected. i have for the most part demonstrated that my own instincts are actually quite good. i trust the right people.

so from the word go i didn't feel good about dr. robinson. i didn't feel like he cared. i didn't  feel like he knew much about CML. i didn't like his attitude in just telling me what medicine to take and never talking WITH me about things, just talking to me.

i have to trust these feelings. i guess i just thought that i was stuck with that. that no doctor would really be different. the dr i went to in NC was nicer about it but he still basically said that my care was routine and that traveling for it was pointless, and made me feel again like my instincts were an over reaction.

this is really really hard. i have for so long felt that i could not trust my own instincts that following through on them is incredibly hard. but i will do so starting today. so, if you're a person in my life who i never really trusted, you're gone. i don't have time for that. and if on the other hand you're a person who i've always trusted, you better live up to that. but i trust that you will, because i have a good instinct for who to trust :)