Sometimes You Write Something… and Then Life Echoes It Back
- Val Blair
- Apr 15
- 4 min read
I wrote something recently about intuition.
Not in a polished, definitive way.
More in the way you write when you’re circling something that has been quietly shaping your life for a long time, and you’re finally ready to put language to it, even if the language isn’t perfect yet.
I wrote about how intuition doesn’t always arrive as clarity.
Sometimes it’s a pause you can’t explain.
Sometimes it’s a pull you don’t fully trust yet.
Sometimes it’s your body responding before your mind has had time to catch up.
I sent it in, closed my laptop, and let it go.
And then a few days later, I was sitting at Colgate, listening to Tracee Ellis Ross speak.
She started talking about intuition.
Not as an idea, but as something she lives with. Something she listens to.
She described how it shows up for her physically, how there are moments where her body gives her a signal before she can rationalize it, before she can make sense of it. A tightening, a resistance, a feeling that something isn’t aligned, even if everything around her looks right.
And then she said something that stayed with me.
That she trusts that.
That she doesn’t try to override it just because it doesn’t come with a full explanation.
A pause. A pull. A tightening.
And that when she feels disconnected, she goes back to simple things, like being in nature, not to escape, but to regulate, to return to herself, to hear more clearly what’s already there.
I remember sitting there thinking…
I just wrote about this.
Not in the sense that the idea belonged to me. But in the recognition of it.
The feeling of hearing something reflected back to you, from a completely different voice, in a completely different place, and realizing… this isn’t just personal.
I think we assume intuition is supposed to be obvious.
That it will come in clearly.
That it will make sense right away.
That we’ll feel confident in it the moment it appears.
But most of the time, it doesn’t work like that.
It’s quieter.
It shows up in the small shifts we almost miss. The way your shoulders tense in a conversation that looks perfectly fine on the surface. The slight hesitation before you say yes to something that, on paper, you should want. The feeling of expansion in one direction, even when you don’t yet understand where it leads.
In the interview, I described intuition as something that shows up in the body first. Not as a fully formed thought, not as something you can immediately explain, but as a signal.
And sitting there, listening, I realized how universal that actually is.
We may describe it differently. We may trust it at different levels.
But feeling it and trusting it are not the same thing.
What’s more common is that we override it.
Not because we don’t feel it, but because we’ve learned not to trust what doesn’t come with proof.
We explain it away. We tell ourselves we’re overthinking. We default to what makes sense, what’s expected, what looks right from the outside.
And over time, almost without realizing it, we start to disconnect from the part of us that knew before we had the evidence to back it up.
The thing about intuition is that it doesn’t argue with you.
It doesn’t get louder to compete with your thoughts. It doesn’t try to convince you.
It just stays there. Quiet. Consistent. Unchanged.
Coming back to it isn’t complicated, but it does require something we don’t practice very often.
Pausing.
Even briefly. just notice.
The next time you’re about to make a decision, before you analyze it, before you ask for input, before you start building a case for or against it…
just notice.
What does your body do?
Not what you think. Not what you should do.
What do you actually feel?
Sometimes it’s subtle. Sometimes it’s immediate.
But it’s usually there.
And you don’t have to act on it perfectly. You don’t have to get it right every time.
Just noticing it begins to rebuild something that a lot of us have lost along the way.
Trust.
I think the part I’m still learning is this:
You don’t have to go searching for your intuition.
It’s not hidden somewhere waiting for you to unlock it.
It’s already there, in the smallest moments. In the first reaction. In the quiet signals we’ve learned to move past too quickly.
Sometimes, it just takes hearing it reflected back to recognize it.
And once you do, it becomes a little harder to ignore.
And if you’re in a season where things feel unclear, or heavy, or like you’ve drifted a little further from yourself than you meant to…
you don’t have to find all the answers.
Sometimes it starts with something much smaller.
A pause. A feeling. A quiet knowing you choose, just once, not to talk yourself out of.
If You Want to Go Deeper
You choose not to talk yourself out of.
If you’d like to go deeper into this, I recently shared more about my relationship with intuition in a conversation with Authority Magazine.
If you’re looking for gentle ways to reconnect with yourself, you can explore more through A Light in the Chaos.
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