What My Life Says Back

Years ago, I wrote something about affirmations. I found it again recently, and I recognized the woman who wrote it. She believed words mattered.

She believed that if you were going to say something about yourself, you had to believe it. Not stand in front of a mirror repeating something while another part of you didn’t believe what you were saying.

Sometimes it is not that you do not believe it. Sometimes fear gets there first. Or anxiety. Or a depression you have not put a name to yet. Before an affirmation can reach you, it has to get past all of that too.

I am successful can feel too far away, especially when belief cannot go that deep yet. So I suggested starting smaller, somewhere your mind could actually reach:

I am capable of being successful.

Believe that first.

Stay present with it.

Feel it.

Repeat it.

And then I wrote something that stopped me when I read it again:

Once you begin to truly believe that you are capable, then you will take action steps to prove yourself right.

There it was. Evidence was already trying to get into the conversation. I just didn’t recognize it yet.

Because I also wrote something much bigger. I said that if you believed your affirmations, felt them, stayed present with them and repeated them consistently, eventually what you affirmed about yourself would become true in your daily life.

I don’t know that I would write that sentence today.

That does not embarrass me. I understand the woman who wrote it. I still believe words matter. I still believe there is power in what we repeatedly tell ourselves. I still believe in mirrors.

But maybe not only for the reason I did then.

There is something about standing in front of yourself. And I don’t mean just checking your hair, your face, your clothes, what everybody else is going to see when you walk out the door. I mean really sitting with yourself. Take off everything man-made for a minute. The title. The job. The money. The clothes. The accomplishments. The things somebody told you a successful woman should want. The things religion told you. The things family told you. The things society told you. Even some of the things you told yourself because, at one point, you needed them to be true.

What is left? You.

Before I start telling that woman who she should become, I want to know who she is. That question has become more important to me as I have gotten older.

Maybe that is also why traditional vision boards never completely held me. Mine mostly lived in my head. I could imagine things, see them, want them. But another question would come: when does the vision change, and how will I know? What happens when the woman who created it changes? What if I get exactly what I asked for and discover I do not want to live inside it?

Then the other day, my niece told me she had just made a vision board and, if I remember correctly, put “Getting Back to Self!” in the middle.

I liked that.

It made me think I might make one again, only differently this time. I would still put the things I want on it. But I do not want it to only tell me what to get anymore. I want something on it that reminds me to keep returning to myself.

I am still capable of imagining a future. I still believe we can see things in the mind before we see them with our eyes. I still believe hope can give us somewhere to stand when the evidence has not arrived yet.

But I have become less interested in telling the future what it has to look like. Because no matter how much I imagine it, eventually the future stops being a vision. I have to enter it. Then it becomes experience. And experience gives me information imagination could not. That is where the test begins.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped asking only what do I believe? I started asking what can I actually verify in my life? What changed because I believed something. What did I actually do. What am I taking credit for that I did not accomplish alone. What am I claiming now that the record simply does not support.

That last question is uncomfortable. It’s easy to examine somebody else’s belief. It’s different when the old words belong to you.

My past self does not get automatic authority simply because she is me. But my present self does not get to disrespect her either. She knew some things. She misunderstood some things. She believed some things because she needed them. She got me here.

And sometimes, when I go back and read her, I discover she was already moving toward something I can finally name. Affirmation was one example. Action was already sitting inside the old writing.

I found it somewhere else too. Years later, in another piece, I wrote about faith, responsibility, and what we pass down to the next generation. I ended it with: What we do today is the answer. Today I will…

Again. Action. Apparently I kept coming back to the same problem: what are you going to do with what you say you believe?

Becoming a mother made that question much harder to avoid. Community organizing did too. It was no longer only what I believed. It was whether I believed it enough to teach it, to pass it down.

I remember sitting at a table with a folder of documented conditions in front of me, the actual list, in writing, certain that once someone with authority read it, something would happen. I watched the person across from me nod, thank us for our thoroughness, and change nothing. That was the moment I understood the facts weren’t the thing that moved anybody. Affirmations never taught me that. Being right does not make a decision-maker say yes. Hope does not move money.

So the next time I walked into a room like that, I did not bring a folder. What moved things was relationships. Preparation. Knowing exactly who could say yes and what they actually cared about. A specific demand instead of a general grievance. People willing to show up together, more than once, until an answer was required instead of offered.

That changed what evidence meant to me.

If I say I am a leader, where is the leadership. If I say I care about people, what happens to people around me. If I say I have faith, what does that faith produce.

I have a tattoo on my foot that says walk by faith. I got it years ago so that every time I looked down, it would remind me this step is just by faith. The faith part has faded some since then. Maybe that is just skin. Maybe it is not.

And now I am asking a harder question.

How do I know when a prayer has actually been answered?

Because the door opened, the money came, the timing worked out. How do I know that was the good wind blowing in my direction? Did I test it?

We name things fast. Blessing. Favor. Destiny. And we name the other things just as fast. Failure. Bad luck. Punishment. But according to what?

If something brings me money but also feeds greed in me, was it entirely a blessing?

I am not saying every painful experience is secretly a blessing. Some things hurt because they hurt. Some losses are just losses. But I can still ask what happened next. What did it expose. What did I become, and what did I refuse to become.

The evidence isn’t only whether I got what I wanted. It’s what getting it produced, in me, around me, for other people. It’s the same question I was already asking about leadership. I just hadn’t followed it into prayer yet.

That habit of examining rather than accepting has pushed me toward a different kind of humility: what I know, and even what has gone well for me, may not prove as much as I think it does.

How often do we use the things that went right in our lives as evidence that we must have deserved them? Maybe the job came because I was favored. Maybe the marriage survived because I knew something someone else didn’t. But am I sure? What else happened? Who helped? What don’t I know about their story?

Evidence has made me more careful about the stories I tell about myself. Not shrunk. More accurate.

Because evidence is not only something that tears a belief down. Sometimes it tells you that you’ve been shrinking yourself.

There was evidence of who I was long before I could comfortably name it: notebooks full of questions I never let go of, books underlined until the spine gave out, the refusal to leave a room until I understood what was actually happening in it. And still some part of me was waiting to feel the way I thought all of that was supposed to make me feel.

The record was ahead of my self-image.

So evidence does not always arrive to humble you. Sometimes it says: look again. You have already become something you keep insisting you are not.

That is why I have no interest in trading affirmation for cynicism. I still believe. I still hope. I still pray. I still imagine. I still listen to my heart. What has changed is that I no longer need everything to fit into the same category.

This is what I believe. This is what I experienced. This is what I can verify. This is what I think it means. This is what I still don’t know.

None of that cancels the rest. It’s just how I finally know where I’m standing.

I used to think changing my mind meant I had been wrong. Now I think sometimes it means I kept paying attention. I learned. I lived. I got more information. The test gave me a result I didn’t have before. Then I decide what to do with it.

Someone told me once that I was like a pancake. Flip-floppy. No follow-through on what I said I felt. It bothered me for years, until someone else told me why a pancake has to flip. It does not matter how low the heat is or how high. It does not matter if the temperature is perfect. The pancake still has to turn, or it burns on one side. You have to watch the bubbles. You have to know when to turn it.

I was never flaky. I was just watching the bubbles. Changing my mind was not proof that I never meant it the first time. It was proof I kept my hand on the pan.

Maybe that’s why I keep wanting to return to things. Old writing. Old books. Questions. Versions of myself. I can read the same words at two different stages of my life and, in some ways, not read the same thing.

The words stayed still. I didn’t.

So I go back. Not always to prove the younger woman wrong. Sometimes I go back because she left something there for me.

Like that old sentence about affirmations: Take action steps to prove yourself right.

Today, I would change it. Take action. Then pay attention. Look at what happened. Ask what caused it, who contributed, what it cost, what it produced, whether I’m becoming more generous or more consumed with myself. Ask whether the thing I prayed for is still something I’d call a blessing now that I’ve lived inside it.

And if the evidence doesn’t prove me right?

Good. Now I know something I didn’t know before. I can look again. I can question again. I can choose again.

I used to think the power was in what I could say about my life.

Now I am more interested in what my life says back.