You Didn’t Imagine It

Some endings are invisible. Some beginnings feel like remembering. This is the quiet return to yourself.

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Ever sensed the energy change in a room but doubted yourself? This chapter unpacks those quiet moments we dismiss where intuition is real, self-betrayal feels safer, and clarity costs more than silence. For anyone who's ever felt the shift but stayed anyway.

Something would shift mid-conversation, and I’d feel it before I could explain it. The room stayed the same, the faces didn’t change, but the energy was different. It was like a subtle pull in the air. I’d leave wondering if it was just me. Maybe I read too much into it, maybe I was tired, and maybe I expected too much. The tone had changed, though. The way they looked at me with less warmth but more calculation. The laugh wasn’t the same. It wasn’t just in my head.

This chapter isn’t a callout and it’s not a blame game either. Across cultures, especially in professional spaces, intuition is often dismissed as emotional or irrational. We’re taught to override what we feel with what can be proven, and in that gap, we learn to mistrust ourselves. I'd say it’s the part no one talks about, the quiet self-betrayal, the tiny moments we swallow, and the ways we rewrite our own reality to keep things easier. You tell yourself it wasn’t that bad, that maybe they didn’t mean it, and that maybe your reaction is the real problem.

There was a season where I trained myself to unfeel. I’d dissect every interaction until I found a version I could live with, one that didn’t require confrontation or distance, I wasn’t avoiding the truth, I was trying to survive it, since naming what you feel has consequences, and sometimes pretending is safer.

When the Energy Shifted

I remember the quiet shoulder shrugs when I spoke up, the fake laughs when I made a joke that landed a little too honest, the way certain people turned colder the moment I started growing, healing, and becoming harder to manipulate. I saw and felt the shift, but I kept telling myself I was imagining it because facing it meant letting go. I wasn’t being sensitive. That was awareness and clarity trying to cut through the noise.

We talk a lot about trusting others, but not enough about trusting ourselves, especially when no one else validates what we see, when the room gaslights you with silence, and when the people closest to you treat your clarity like conflict.

Here’s what I’ve learned through trial, error, and a thousand internal rewrites: You didn’t imagine it. If your stomach sank for no reason, if the air felt heavy after they spoke, if you left feeling smaller, man, you didn’t imagine it. You weren’t asking for too much, you were reaching for something fair, something that should’ve been there all along.

I once entered a mentorship thinking it was built on trust. I showed up fully, gave my time, my attention, my experience. I taught things they didn’t know, helped shape a skill they’d later rely on, even build from, but somewhere along the way, the story changed. They started acting like they’d always known it, like it came from their own brilliance, their own effort, and they even credited others sometimes, people who hadn’t been in the room.

My presence became a convenience, not a connection. Not one person asked where they learned it, not one acknowledged what I had given. I gave pieces of myself in that space, and I listened to them give credit to other people, watched them talk about how they were self-taught, how it all came naturally, no mention of where it really started, no pause to acknowledge what I’d shared.

I sat with that ache for days, kept questioning if I was the problem, maybe I should’ve drawn clearer lines, maybe I expected too much, but deep down, I knew that space wasn’t designed to hold me, and honestly, I was done shrinking to fit inside something that never saw me clearly to begin with.

We minimize our gut because we’re afraid of what it costs to honor it, but trust me, shrinking costs more. Intuition doesn’t scream, it whispers. It tugs at you quietly, shows up in the spaces where things don’t quite add up, when the words say one thing but the energy says another. You noticed and felt it for a reason, and if no one else sees it, that doesn’t make it less real. That discomfort, that sudden shift, that gut pull, it was information, not imagination. You saw it, you felt it, and now it’s time to believe yourself.

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You were never lost. You were only becoming real.