When Do Assumptions Become Our Truth?

“I learned not to let my assumptions become my truth.”

I wrote those words many years ago.

I came across them again recently in something I had written for my old Hug Mail emails, and they made me stop and think.

Not because I had forgotten the words, but because life has given me many more years to understand them.

How often do we believe something simply because we have told ourselves it must be true?

We assume we know what someone thinks about us.

We assume we know how something will turn out before we have even tried.

We tell ourselves we are too old, too inexperienced, not good enough, not ready, or that perhaps we have missed our chance.

And little by little, those assumptions can settle into our thinking.

We stop questioning them.

We begin making decisions around them.

Eventually, something that began as a thought can start feeling very much like a fact.

But was it ever actually true?

Looking back over my own life, I can see times when I believed things about myself, other people, and even my future that were based more on fear, doubt or past experiences than on what was actually happening in front of me.

I didn't always recognise that at the time.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts that comes with getting older. We have the opportunity to look back and see things from a different place.

Some of the things we once believed so strongly no longer have the same hold over us.

Some we can even laugh about now.

And some leave us wondering how different things might have been if we had simply stopped and asked:

Is this really true, or have I just decided that it is?

I still make assumptions. I think we all do.

But these days, I am more willing to question them.

What do I actually know?

What am I simply afraid might happen?

Am I responding to what is real, or to a story I have created in my own mind?

There is freedom in asking those questions.

Because what we believe isn't always what is true.

And perhaps one of the wisest things we can do is give ourselves permission to question the stories we have been telling ourselves.

I learned not to let my assumptions become my truth.

Maybe today there is an assumption in your own life that deserves another look.

Love,

Narelle x