What Happens When You Stop Outsourcing Your Reality?

Happy birthday to me!

After what has felt like a nine-year cycle of destruction, endings, shedding, releasing, sickness, rebuilding, questioning, and being asked over and over again to let go of what no longer fits, I am finally stepping into a one year.

A year of beginnings. A year of creation. A year of deciding who the fuck I am now.

And maybe more importantly, deciding what I actually believe.

Because the older I get, the more I realize how much of what we call reality was handed to us before we were ever old enough to question it.

We were told what God is, what success looks like, how money works, who we should trust, what medicine is supposed to do, what relationships should look like, what history is, what our bodies are capable of, what is considered normal, what is considered crazy, and which questions are acceptable to ask.

And most people never stop long enough to wonder how much of that they actually chose for themselves.

That is the question I keep coming back to now:

What happens when you stop outsourcing your reality?

What happens when you stop assuming that because an institution says something, it must be true?

And equally, what happens when you stop assuming that because something is alternative, spiritual, rebellious, or outside the mainstream, it must automatically be true either?

What happens when you actually start looking?

When you follow the money. When you pay attention to who benefits. When you notice when the story changes. When something doesn’t quite add up and instead of overriding that feeling, you get curious about it.

Because evidence matters.

But so does consciousness.

So does discernment.

So does that moment in your body when something just does not feel right and, instead of deciding you already know the answer, you ask another fucking question.

That is something I teach constantly inside The Healing Path.

You do not always need to come to a conclusion.

Sometimes your job is simply to find the next question.

Because the minute we decide we already know, we stop looking.

And I think we need to start looking again.

We are living through a time when things we were once told were absolute are being questioned, revised, challenged, reconsidered, and sometimes completely rewritten.

The more you look at the systems underneath the systems, the more obvious it becomes that almost nothing is as simple as we were taught.

Money is not just money.

Medicine is not just medicine.

Government is not just government.

Religion is not just faith.

History is not simply a fixed record of exactly what happened.

Success is not a universal destination.

Relationships are not one-size-fits-all.

Spirituality is not immune from ego, influence, money, or power.

And your body is not something you should be taught to distrust every time it tells you something feels wrong.

That does not mean every conspiracy is true.

It does not mean every doctor is corrupt, every politician is lying, every institution is evil, or every alternative theory is secretly the answer.

It means we need to stop being intellectually lazy.

It means we need to stop handing our discernment over to somebody else simply because they have a title, a platform, a degree, a collar, a badge, a microphone, or a blue checkmark.

Questioning something is not the same as deciding it is false.

And questioning authority is not the same as believing every opposing narrative you come across.

To me, real discernment is being able to stand in the middle long enough to say:

I don’t know yet. Show me more.

Show me the evidence.

Show me who funded it.

Show me who profits.

Show me what changed.

Show me what we actually know and where we are still filling in the blanks.

And then let me use my own fucking brain.

I have never been someone who keeps her mouth shut particularly well.

Anyone who knows me knows that.

And I have never been big on asking permission either. My operating philosophy has pretty much always been: ask for forgiveness, not permission.

So this next chapter is not about suddenly finding my voice.

I have had one.

Believe me.

Most people probably already think I say exactly what I think.

They have no idea.

Because there is another layer that goes through my head when I watch people blindly hand their authority over to a politician, a pastor, a doctor, an institution, a news outlet, a spiritual teacher, or anyone else and simply assume, well, they must have my best interests in mind. HA!

That is the part that makes me want to grab people by the hair and say:

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, THINK.

Ask why.

Ask who benefits.

Ask what is not being said.

Ask what the other side is saying.

Ask whether the story you were given actually makes sense.

Ask whether you believe something because you examined it for yourself or because somebody handed it to you years ago and you never looked at it again.

And then keep asking.

I think that is where I am going next.

Not because I want everyone to believe what I believe.

Actually, the opposite.

I want more people to stop needing somebody else to tell them what to believe.

I want to be a mirror.

I want to say the thing that makes someone stop for a second and think:

Wait. Why do I believe that?

I want to talk about the uncomfortable shit.

I want to pull at the threads.

I want to question the stories we have collectively agreed not to question.

I want to be willing to say, “Something about this does not make sense to me,” without immediately needing to replace it with another absolute truth.

And I probably want to do all of that louder than I have before.

Not louder for attention.

Louder because I think people are starving to reconnect with their own discernment.

Not mine.

Theirs.

Because sovereignty, to me, is not knowing everything.

It is becoming so rooted in yourself that nobody else gets to hijack your understanding of reality.

You can listen.

You can learn.

You can change your mind.

You can be wrong.

You can ask another question.

But you remain the person holding the pen.

And once you learn how to do that?

You become pretty fucking hard to manipulate.

Pretty fucking hard to control.

Pretty fucking hard to bullshit.

You become unfuckwithable.

So maybe that is where Year One takes me.

Maybe I become a bigger mirror.

Maybe I say more of the things I have historically softened, edited, or kept inside because I already knew how people would react.

Maybe I stop worrying quite so much about whether everyone thinks I am too much.

Because maybe the point was never to be palatable.

Maybe the point was to make people think.

So happy f*cking birthday to me.

Let’s see what happens when I stop turning the volume down.

Michelle Palma

Mirror & the Moon

Purple Moon Healing Group