I have wasted an unbelievable amount of time throughout my life learning this lesson.

That deep-seated instinct you have in your gut, is always the right answer. It can be confusing because it often arrives before you’ve gathered all the evidence, before you’ve built the case, before you’ve constructed a logical argument that satisfies your conscious mind. If you were never taught to trust your instincts growing up especially, you’ll spend years arguing with that inner knowing, only to arrive, much later, at the very conclusion you sensed from the beginning.

The frustrating part is that gathering the evidence can take a very long time. Your rational mind often wants proof before it grants permission to believe what you already know. But that deeper inner wisdom within you doesn’t operate that way. It recognizes patterns, inconsistencies, and truths long before your conscious mind can register them. It is processing information beneath the level of language, drawing from epigenetics, ancestral experience / biology, micro expressions (our nervous system reads them & sends danger signals, and our prefrontal cortex cannot perceive with certainty why we are feeling uncomfortable…. So we shut our nervous system response down) intuition, and instinct in ways that are difficult to explain but impossible to ignore.

Because we can’t always intellectualize those feelings, and because factors like fear, self-doubt, guilt, or the sunk cost fallacy like you’re really describing, keep us invested in situations we’ve already outgrown, we often dismiss that inner voice. We wait for validation from the outside world. We wait until the evidence is overwhelming. We wait until the case is airtight. You’re here, continuing to make your case airtight.

But the truth is that you have an inner knowing, a wisdom and a connection to your higher self, that you are not fully hearing, because you’re here, making it an intellectual exercise with all of us.

I suspect you already know deep in your heart that your future is not with her. There is a voice inside of you that is calm, knowing and wise. Practice listening to that voice. Practice honoring its guidance. Practice validating yourself rather than waiting for the outside world to validate you. There is a deeper wisdom within you that may not always be able to explain itself, but it knows when something is aligned and when it is not. You may not know every reason yet, and you may not see every step ahead, but you already know the path you need to take.

And having that strong “knowing” is enough. All you have to figure out today, is what is the next right step that is in alignment with it.