Listening to My Gut and Kim Basinger

"I feel there are two people inside me -- me and my intuition. If I go against her, she'll screw me every time, and if I follow her, we get along quite nicely." -- Kim Basinger

I think it's fair to say I'm a fair person. I've been told that I bend over backwards to be fair to other people. One might think that would be a good thing, but it's a quality that hasn't always served me well. When I was married, I always took my ex at his word, even when what he said was at odds with my nagging intuition. It felt like the "fair" thing to do, since only *he* would be able to explain the truth of *his* inner life. What I overlooked is that one must have the capability, the motivation, and the courage to be emotionally honest, and therein lies the rub. To be fair -- because it's hard *not* to be -- I don't believe that most of my ex's emotional dishonesty was deliberate, but it was a series of lies that stung me all the same. If a friend accidentally slams a car door on your hand, it still hurts like a mo-fo, even when it's not deliberate.

Education is expensive -- whether you pay in cash or in painful emotional regret. It's even more expensive if you keep taking a class and failing, as I did with Intuition 101. One of the biggest things I've learned from the breakup of my marriage is the importance of heeding my intuition. I will *never* take anyone at their word if my intuition is poking me in the stomach and telling me something else. Ignoring what my gut was telling me in favor of my ex's explanations that didn't add up was a very expensive lesson I only began to understand after we reached the fork in the road called Splitsville.

Truth reveals itself in behavior, not words. When someone's behavior and words diverge, intuition is the warning system that alerts you to that divide. If you're lucky like I am, you have at least one close friend who won't let you get away with *any* emotional bullshit created to ignore or deny the existence of that divide. But even if I weren't so fortunate, I now rely on my intuition to do the same thing. And I'm paying attention enough to be able to ace Intuition 101 this time around. Maybe I'll even go on to write the book Intuition for Dumbshits, since I lived that way most of my life.