A while back, I was in Argentina. At the airport to catch a flight to Patagonia, I realized I had left my phone in the Uber. Gone. No way to get it back.
I decided I would go to Patagonia anyway.
I’m from the 1900s. I know how to read a map. I wouldn’t have pictures, but I would be present.
I could not have been moreso.
Then, more recently, I left my wallet in a restaurant. Realized it halfway home on the subway. And I didn’t panic, or reproach myself. Not even a little. I just thought, okay, and turned around.
The more you practice moving through the things that go wrong, the more you realize: this is just life. Things go sideways. You figure it out. You keep going.
That’s faith. Not the religious kind necessarily. Faith in yourself. Faith that whatever gets thrown at you, you will find a way through it. Not because “everything works out”, but because you are someone who figures things out.
And here’s what I’ve come to believe about faith and fear: they weigh exactly the same. They take the same energy, the same commitment, the same daily decision to pick one up and carry it forward. The only difference is what they build.
What Faith Actually Is
I think we’ve gotten faith wrong, culturally speaking.
We’ve made it into something passive. Something you claim while waiting for things to work out. Something you invoke when you don’t want to take responsibility for a decision. I’ll just have faith that it’ll be fine.
That’s not faith. That’s magical thinking.
Real faith is what happens when you move anyway. When you don’t know how something is going to turn out and you take the step. When you can’t see the whole staircase and you put your foot on the first one. When you go to Patagonia without your phone because you already bought the ticket and Patagonia is still Patagonia.
The action is the faith. Not just the belief.
And this matters enormously for high functioning, overfunctioning people, because they tend to be waiting. Waiting to feel ready, to not be scared, or for enough certainty that the decision feels safe.
That certainty may never come.
Why High Functioning People Default to Fear
It’s not that they’re cowards. In fact, I’d say it’s quite the opposite.
High functioning people are extraordinary thinkers. They often can see every possible outcome, every risk, every way something could go wrong. That capacity serves them enormously in most areas of life. But in the territory of faith, it becomes a liability.
Because you cannot think your way into a future that is inherently uncertain and beyond your imagination. You cannot strategize your way into love, or into a career path, or into comfort with leaving something that isn’t working, or into staying with something that requires more of you than you currently know how to give. At some point you have to move into the unknown.
Codependent, overfunctioning people in particular struggle here. They’ve spent years learning that controlling the environment was how you stayed safe. Uncertainty meant something bad was probably coming. So they plan, and anticipate, and build contingency plans for their contingency plans.
And all of that planning can look like wisdom from the outside but from the inside, it’s often just fear with better vocabulary.
Faithlessness is avoiding. It’s staying in the job you hate because at least you know what it is. It’s staying in the relationship that’s not working because leaving feels like stepping off a cliff. It’s circling the decision for the tenth time because making it means something will change, and change, even necessary, desirable, hopeful change, is a conscious step into the unknown.
Faith is building. Even when you don’t know what you’re building toward.
Faith Without Action Is Magical Thinking
Your parents, if they got married, and even by having you, acted on faith. They did not know what the future held, but trusted that they’d figure it out as they went. That’s what faith actually is. Not certainty. Not a guarantee. Just the willingness to keep moving.
Faith without action is magical thinking. Sitting back and believing everything will work out, without actually moving toward it, is avoidance wearing a spiritual costume. Real faith is making the call. Having the conversation. Booking the flight. Saying yes before you feel ready, because ready comes after, not before.
The Thing You’re Afraid of Might Actually Happen
I want to say something that might sound harsh but that I find genuinely comforting.
Things might not be okay. The thing you’re afraid of might actually happen. Things could get messy. The relationship might end. The opportunity you hoped for may not materialize. The trip to Patagonia might be cold and lonely and nothing like you imagined.
I’m not going to tell you otherwise.
But here’s what I know from sitting with people through some of the hardest moments of their lives. You will figure it out. Because you are someone who figures things out. You have been doing it your whole life. You have endured disappointment, heartbreak, and loss. You have got through things that felt unsurvivable and found your way through situations you had no map for. You have been embarrassed, and even humiliated. And you have endured.
Faith isn’t believing things will be okay. Faith is knowing that whatever happens, you’ll still be standing on the other side of it. Maybe changed, maybe a little bruised. But standing. And probably with a story you’re proud of having lived.
Disappointment + Forgiveness = Trust
And the last thing I want to say is this.
Learning to have faith in yourself doesn’t happen because you start making perfect decisions. It happens through disappointment, and forgiveness, and trying again.
You’re going to make the wrong call sometimes. You’re going to move toward something with faith and have it not work out. You’re going to look back at a decision and think, I would not have made that choice if I’d known what would come after it. That’s not failure. That’s learning. And learning is not the same as knowing.
The work is not in making perfect decisions. It’s in forgiving yourself for the imperfect, inevitably human ones. In saying, “I see why that happened. I didn’t know what I know now, and I choose to forgive myself for not knowing what I could not have known.” And then, having learned some things, having more confidence in the moves you make next time.
Disappointment plus forgiveness equals trust. That’s true in your relationships with other people. And it’s true in your relationship with yourself.
That’s how faith gets built. Not in one grand leap. In a thousand small ones, most of them imperfect, all of them your own.
Ready to Work With a Life Transitions Therapist in New York?
If you’ve been standing at the edge of something for a long time, waiting to feel ready, I want you to know that ready is not coming first. The fear and the faith weigh the same. You get to choose which one you pick up.
I work with high functioning adults across New York who are ready to stop avoiding and start building. The first session is always free.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the difference between fear and intuition when making a decision?
This is one of the most important questions you can learn to ask yourself. Fear tends to feel contracting, avoidant, like the urge to stay still or go back. Intuition tends to feel clearer, more directional, even when it’s uncomfortable. The complication for high functioning people who have spent years overriding their feelings with strategy is that it can be genuinely hard to tell the difference. That’s often exactly the kind of discernment that therapy helps you develop.
Why do I keep avoiding a decision even when I know what I need to do?
Because knowing and doing are different things entirely. Knowing what you need to do requires intelligence. Doing it requires faith. And faith is hard to access when you’ve spent a long time learning that the unknown isn’t safe. The avoidance isn’t weakness. It’s a very old protection strategy that worked once and hasn’t quite got the memo that things are different now.
Is fear of change the same as anxiety?
They often overlap, but they’re not identical. Fear of change is usually about a specific threshold, the moment before something shifts. Anxiety tends to be more pervasive and global–that all roads lead to disaster, for example. What they share is an intolerance of uncertainty. And that intolerance almost always has roots in early experiences where uncertainty felt threatening rather than just unknown.
How do I learn to trust myself after making bad decisions?
Through disappointment and forgiveness. Not by making perfect decisions going forward, but by learning to be genuinely compassionate with yourself about the imperfect ones. You didn’t know what you know now. You were doing what made sense with what you had. Forgiving yourself for that, accepting that learning–not perfect execution–is the best ANYONE can do, is where self trust starts to rebuild.
What does faith have to do with therapy?
More than people expect. A lot of what happens in good therapy is learning to tolerate uncertainty. To sit with not knowing. To make moves without guarantees. To trust yourself incrementally, through small risks and survivable disappointments, until the muscle gets stronger. Therapy doesn’t give you a map. It helps you trust yourself enough to go without one.
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