Intuition is a funny thing. I believe most people have some sense of it, whatever they choose to call it. Common sense; that gut feeling. I think it’s something that lives inside all of us and it’s our choice to lean into it or let it be.

Like most gifts of this nature, it has to be nurtured to grow and reach its full potential. Give it room to take up space in your body and practice trying to listen to it or feel it even if you’re not sure what that looks like quite yet. It can turn into something incredibly interesting and beautiful, if you let it.

I’ve always had a strong sense of intuition my entire life, but I didn’t really pay it much mind until the last couple of years. It would show up in small ways growing up and I believe there is a case to be made that my childhood trauma is what helped me become more sensitive to it than others might be.

I walked on eggshells my whole childhood trying desperately to avoid conflict and ease tensions before they even fully formed yet. This for me came in the form of reading people’s micro expressions and becoming very attuned to their energies and emotions. I’m extremely empathetic and sensitive to the slightest changes in tones and emotions in others. I also easily take on other’s emotions as if they were my own. My friends poke fun of me in a playful way for how easily I cry at movies and videos I see online of small acts of love or kindness. I don’t mind anymore, because I’ve come to realize this is more of a superpower than an embarrassment. But this sensitivity did come from a place of a necessity; of survival. I only looked at it as a trauma response once I got out of that situation, and thought that sensitivity was something I needed to heal from and let go in order to fully heal myself of the past. But it never really went away. Not with the limited therapy I went to and not with how much time has passed since then and the countless days I’ve spent working on myself and trying to become more in sync with my own body and emotions.

I wondered for a while, if it never goes away, does that mean I’m not truly healed? But the more I sat with it and let it be for lack of ideas of what to do with it, I noticed it started showing up in different ways. There’s been a few times when I’ve met people who immediately gave me an off feeling despite them appearing and acting completely normal. For whatever reason, they either gave me the creeps or left me with a sense of their whole persona they just introduced being a fraud. I would gage other peoples’ reactions to them, and much to my dismay, I’d find I was the only one who felt any concerns about these people. Everyone else seemed to love and trust them, thinking of them as valuable parts of the teams they joined. I would be the only descending voice in the group, and so I kept my opinions to myself thinking maybe I’m the one misjudging them.

The first person this happened with, was a male coworker who was a recent hire at my then job. The place employed a lot of high schoolers because of what it was, and he was nearing 30 years old. As a trainer, I tried to welcome him in warmly and openly but immediately got a bad feeling about him. I expressed this to one of my managers I thought I trusted, but he brushed me off saying the guy was great. Fast forward a month or so, and my store manager comes to me asking me if there was ever a time where I felt uncomfortable around the guy. I explained to her a night when we were closing together where he asked me out halfway through the shift. I told him I was flattered but no. He wouldn’t drop it. He asked me a couple of times if I was sure, then said he’d ask me again at the end of the night, as if for some reason I’d change my mind. I told him outright my answer would still be the same and he simply said, “we’ll see,” with that smile that always made me feel uneasy.

I tried to stay away from him the rest of the night, but he’d follow me around the store. At the end of the shift, he stayed behind while I locked up and decided himself to walk with me through the very dark and empty parking lot to my car. During this uncomfortable walk, he asked me out again. Getting a feeling he was going to keep following me, I stopped halfway to my truck in the middle of the road. No one was around, and the only other closer who was with us that night was already driving away from us at that point. I told him no again and didn’t say anything else. I could see the wheels turning in his head while we stood there in silence trying to figure out how he was going to overcome this challenge. Luckily for me, I never got the sense that he was the kind of guy to force anything physically – maybe from a lack of confidence in himself or whatever it was. I knew I was not in danger in that way, but that doesn’t mean it was a safe situation. After a few moments he just said goodnight and turned to leave. With keys in hand, I stayed in place and made sure he was fully committed to getting to his car before moving an inch myself. When he was halfway there, I turned and got in my truck as quickly as possible.

I told her I initially had a bad feeling about him that I told another manager about, but was brushed off. As I relayed everything, she looked sad and told me that he’s been harassing the underage girls we worked with and doing similar things to them, following them out to their cars late at night and relentlessly making all of them feel uncomfortable. She asked me to write everything I told her into a statement for the police and a week later we had a restraining order against him. He was fired and couldn’t come within however many feet of the store.

The other time this happened was with someone I currently work with, and for the sake of that person ever finding this blog, I shouldn’t go into many details about it now. But this is someone at work that people very much trust and heavily advocate for. A person who I see as manipulative, cruel, and someone who abuses the system in their favor constantly. I thought I was the only one who thought this way until I found others here whom I felt I could trust enough to share my feelings. Whether everyone will come to see the same, only time will tell, and I may not be here when the truth comes out so I may never know that outcome. But I can at least rest in the fact that one day, we all have to lay in the bed we make for ourselves and confront the people we actually are whether we want to or not.

Having feelings about people this way seems like such a fantastical exhibition of the gift of intuition, but sometimes the way it shows up in my life is much smaller as well. Sometimes as I’m driving, I get this feeling to move over into another lane even if I don’t necessarily need to in order to get to my destination. But when I do, that’s when all the traffic in the lane I was just in slams on their brakes all at once almost causing an accident, or they all get caught at a red light for some reason while the new lane I’ve inhabited makes it through just fine.

The most common exercise of my intuitive gift though, happens in the form of music. I am someone who feels deep, emotional connections to music. Through it, I feel true expression of my thoughts and emotions in a way that words would fail me in. It helps me sort through complex times and untangle the mess that my mind becomes sometimes thanks to my ADHD, and helps me recenter myself in a lot of ways. I’m constantly listening to music every day, which is not an exaggeration. I have at least 1 earbud in nearly 24/7 and am constantly sharing new music with my friends and family while always searching for new songs for myself. So, for my intuition to show up primarily through music just feels right. I always have a song playing in my head but in times when my intuition is in play, I can feel a song more loudly and fully than others inside of my body and mind. If I put a playlist on shuffle, that song I suddenly felt so strongly and intensely above the rest plays next. It may seem like a small thing and admittedly as I try to spell it out here for you, my reader, it feels a bit silly to put so much stock into. But this happens so often – multiple times a week. And the only way I can explain it is that I can tell, I can feel inside of me, that this matters in my journey and means something.

In recent months, I’ve worked to listen to my body and emotions more. I pause to ground myself in the moments I’m in and take stock of how and what I’m feeling. I sit with my emotions, whatever they may be and let them fully inhabit my being in the way they want to rather than trying to control the flow of them within myself. In doing so, I feel I’ve opened up some sort of sacred connection to my energy that was previously under lock and key with my incessant need to control everything. But I’m learning in this chapter in my life to let go of things more. In doing so, I’ve been a lot less stressed honestly, and have opened myself up to more opportunities and experiences I previously thought were not meant for me. I may have even opened myself up to receiving internal, intuitive knowledge and messages about the course of my life or the things I’m meant to have in this lifetime.

There’s something in particular lately that my intuition in a loving and caring way hasn’t shut up about for the last few months. An experience I’m about to have, but have the feeling and knowledge that I’m not supposed to discuss with others. I feel that this event will change the course of my life, but is only for me and the other person involved at this time. I shouldn’t say more, but the team on my side guiding me through this wants me to feel excited and I can feel their excited anticipation of it in return as well.

I know there will be some people who object to these kinds of ideas of intuition finding it impossible to rely on feelings that seem to have no physical evidence or merit over reality and the visual or visceral things they’ve come to know and trust. It does seem silly, to trust so wholeheartedly in something you can’t explain as anything other than a gut feeling, but that’s what faith is. And while other’s faith tends to be more religious, mine is something I’ve tendered and grown into my own kind of understanding of this life.

Other people may say that intuition isn’t “magical” or other-worldly because it’s the reading of those micro expressions and subtle tone/energy shifts that help you read people and situations and that’s all it is, and I agree – this does have some contribution to the gift. There’s a great deal that goes into reading and letting yourself feel that intuitive feeling in situations, and being sensitive to people and situations definitely plays a part in it. But that doesn’t mean there’s not still a component of it that can’t be explained; that subtle whisper that you can sense doesn’t come from your own mind or understanding.

Whatever you want to call it or chalk it up to is up to no one but you, as well as what you want to do with it.

All I know is that making the decision to fully let it inhabit myself and taking the time to slow down and give myself quiet moments to become more receptive to it has allowed me to feel more like myself than I ever have in my entire life. I have more direction, even if I don’t know where it will lead me ultimately. I have a deeper sense of trust in myself and my team to guide me through my life and always make a way for me.

Like I said, it’s completely up to you and no one else what you choose to do with it, but before you write it off completely, I implore you to give it a fair chance.

It might surprise you in ways you didn’t know, and help you feel things you didn’t even know were possible.

What do you have to lose?