Your Intuition Could Save Your Life
Start listening to your own voice instead of silencing it.
The most incredible thing happened to me last week. I had the absolute honor of interviewing Jessica Buchanan for an episode of The Mother Plus Podcast. In case you don’t know her story, Jessica is a kidnapping survivor and the New York Times bestselling author of Impossible Odds. In October 2011, while on a routine field mission in Somalia, working as the Education Advisor for her NGO, she was abducted at gunpoint and held for ransom by a group of Somali pirates for 93 days before being rescued by a U.S. Navy SEAL team ordered by President Obama. You can read more about her story here.
And I had the extraordinary privilege of talking with her for an entire hour about motherhood, the power of intuition, and how she’s made it her life’s work to help women learn to reclaim their voices and trust themselves. You know, everyday stuff.
I rarely drop podcast links here, but I would encourage everyone to listen to this conversation—Jessica’s story is so powerful—but women in particular, please listen up: There is an important message you need to hear. Actually, there are two.
1. Stop shaming yourself into gratitude
I have had so many conversations lately with women who feel that they do not deserve to “complain” about their struggles. Because there is always someone who has it worse than you, right? I’ve actually kind of had it with the word “complain” being applied to honest conversations about hard things. People complain about the weather or the pharmacy line or the irritating driver in the school pick-up lane. When we are suffering and dare to express it to someone else—if they can even hear it above the din of our disclaimers about how no, really, it’s fine, it’s not that big of a deal—that is not complaining. That is connecting. That is allowing ourselves to be fully present in our experiences, to expose our vulnerabilities, and to tentatively cast a net to see if someone else understands or if you are all alone in this life. (You aren’t, you aren’t, I promise!)
In one of the most profoundly generous statements I have ever witnessed, Jessica Buchanan shared her own vulnerability and threw a lifeline to women everywhere:
"It wasn't actually the kidnapping and rescue that had rocked my world so much: it was motherhood."
It’s hard to express the relief and gratitude that floods in when someone you consider stronger or more worthy—someone whose suffering “counts”—validates your reality. Here is a woman who had been held hostage for 93 days, who was this close to death, telling us that no, it’s not in our imagination and we are not overreacting or complaining: motherhood is hard as shit.
I wish we didn’t have to turn outward for validation, but many of us do. We don’t trust our own experiences or feelings or SELVES—we dismiss our reality and gaslight ourselves into believing things aren’t the way we perceive them, or we shame ourselves into gratitude. And more often than not, that keeps us stuck.
Stuck in a bad relationship.
Stuck in a job we don’t want.
Stuck in a harmful cycle.
Stuck someplace that isn’t safe.
Why do we do this? Why do we sacrifice ourselves, abandon ourselves, lose our voices? Somehow, on some level, we have forgotten how to trust ourselves. We have given away our authority to systems that do not value us, to structures that were not built to contain us with tenderness and respect.
2. We have forgotten to listen to our own voices.
I am guilty of this. I ignored the little voice inside me—the wise one, the all-knowing one, the sacred one—for so long that I finally lost it, literally, eight times in one year and couldn’t silence it anymore. Our bodies are bursting with clarity and wisdom that desperately wants to get out, to make it to the surface where we can acknowledge it for the gift that it is.
That gift is our intuition.
One of the most powerful aspects of Jessica’s story is the role intuition played. (I’ll keep reminding you, but you simply must listen to this episode. I can’t do it justice by summarizing it and you need to experience the full-body chills for yourself.)
Jessica heard the little voice inside tell her not to go on this mission. She cancelled it twice. She was essentially silenced, or chose to silence herself. The night before, she had a vivid nightmare about being kidnapped. Here’s how she described it:
We live in a culture where women’s rights are undervalued. That is not an opinion. I could veer into myriad rabbit holes to substantiate this statement, but there are other columns devoted to this in a way that mine is not. (I’ll link to some of my favorites below, how does that sound? I’m already getting distracted thinking about which ones to include.)
Many slogans implore people to “trust women,” or “believe women,” when confronting issues of reproductive freedom or sexual violence, but how could we possibly trust women when we do not in fact trust ourselves? When one of the gifts we undeniably possess—our precious intuition and knowing—has all but been bred out of us for centuries?
One of the reasons I renamed my Substack column, besides the fact that I no longer write as much about motherhood, is because this is where I am right now. I am 46 years old, I am twice divorced, I am a single mother of girls, I rebuilt my career from the ground up, and I am reclaiming my voice and my intuition. It’s about fucking time.
How many of us have spent decades watering down our own wisdom and fire so that we stay put / stay good / stay married / stay polite / stay compliant / stay small. Jessica left when she should have stayed; many of us stay when we should have left.
We tell ourselves it’s not that bad (shaming into gratitude at its finest!), that we don’t deserve what we want, that we are overreacting, that we are crazy.
This culture does not believe women because we do not believe ourselves. Or perhaps the inverse is true. But make no mistake, this is through no fault of our own.
Most of us are products of the programming infused into us through our very amniotic fluid (shout out to life begins at conception? Too soon?) and every moment thereafter. It is not our fault. As Jessica so aptly stated at the end of our podcast episode, “It’s not your fault if you’re fucked up. But it is your fault if you stay that way.”
So what do we do about it? We start listening. To ourselves. With respect. With reverence. Our intuition is a sacred gift, and this is no mythical fable, it is simply biology. It is not my personal truth or yours: The existence of intuition and hard-wired instincts is a universal truth.
Jessica reminded us,
“Our intuition was put in us to keep us alive.”
Don’t deny your intuition—trust the voice inside you. You know the one, because it feels like home. It feels right. You don’t have to crowdsource to believe it—you are the sovereign of your life and you do not require permission to feel your feelings and make choices that honor you. Your intuition is the key to your power and your safety—whether or not it literally saves your life, if you listen to it, it will save you in some capacity. It’s the force inside you that begs you not to forget who you are.
We are so used to ignoring it in large and small ways, wondering who might be impacted by the audacity of us choosing ourselves. Even this week, while down with a bad head cold, I considered whether I should suck it up and go teach music classes, even though I feel like absolute trash and have a long history of losing my voice when I try to teach through an illness. But letting people down and being a disappointment is quite a hot button for many of us Gen X WASP-y women: if we choose rest over our work ethic, won’t people think we are flakey, unreliable, or selfish?
Low-key, semi-related book update
Over the past month, I reread my manuscript for the first time since August so I could do a round of revisions on a physical copy. I attacked it with highlighters and pens, making notes of where it could be stronger, where clarity was needed. But more than fixating on what changes are required, I felt an incredible sense of peace reading it. And power. For the first time since I had the “self-indulgent, navel-gazing idea to write a memoir,” I truly believed in it. I read my story, and I believed it to be worthy (ask me how I feel about this later during the excruciating hunt for an agent). It is a story of how my intuition left me clues to follow, endless breadcrumb trails, so that I could retrace my steps and remember who I was. And I did. I wrote myself a door, and I walked through it.
I want to be a lighthouse, a lantern bearer for other women who are remembering themselves after a good long sleep. Many of us are waking up right around the same time—it’s midlife o’clock, and the alarm is sounding. It’s the bell that tolls to remind us to listen. It’s the sound of our own voice, calling us home. Listen.
XO,
Steph
But first, stop everything and listen to this podcast interview with Jessica.
Here are my current favorite feminist Substacks:
Men Yell at Me
Culture Study
The Feminist Parent
Midstory Magazine (big changes coming soon)
Sacred Creative Soul Speaks
(I’m tired and sick and need to stop now. I’ll keep adding to the list.)
Are you local and want to actually DO something pertaining to women reclaiming their voices? Buy tickets for Reclamation: The Fempire Strikes Back on Saturday, February 1st. Save $5 if you buy before Saturday with the code: FEMPIRE.
Thanks for including me in your illustrious list! Thanks for the clarion call to speak out.