The Myth of Credibility

There was a time when I wouldn't speak my truth unless I was sure it would be believed.

Not because I didn’t know what I wanted to say, but because I didn’t trust the world would receive it. I didn’t trust me. I thought I needed the right credentials. The right tone. The right kind of evidence. I needed someone else—someone with letters behind their name or an audience or a seat at the table—to say it first so I could safely echo it.

In a world obsessed with credibility, I learned to question my own voice before I even opened my mouth.

And in that silence, I lost something.We all do.

Because when we internalize the idea that our voice only matters if someone else approves of it, we begin to outsource our truth.

We start looking outward for answers that only we can live.

We hand over our power to institutions and experts and systems that don’t know our stories.

We wait for permission to say the thing we already know.

The Performance of Being Believable

What does it mean to be “credible,” really?

Most people would say it means being believable, trustworthy, backed by evidence. But in practice, credibility often has less to do with truth—and more to do with performance.

We don’t always believe what’s true.

We believe what looks true.

What sounds authoritative.

What feels familiar or comes from someone we’ve been told is an expert.

So we perform. We become polished, careful, filtered. We speak in ways that mirror the voices that have been deemed “legitimate,” just to be taken seriously.

And the tragedy is… it works.

But it also teaches us to distrust our rawness.

Our softness.

Our becoming.

We start to believe that our intuition needs a footnote. That our experience needs a peer-reviewed study to count.

And slowly, we lose the very thing that makes us credible in the first place: our presence, our knowing, our truth.

Who Says What’s Real?

Who gave them the power to say who is credible and who isn’t?

When we really stop and ask that question, the whole system starts to wobble. Because the answer isn’t objective—it’s historical. It’s cultural. It’s colonial. It’s racial. It’s patriarchal. It’s structural.

Credibility, in many ways, is a currency—one not evenly distributed. Some are born into it. Others spend their whole lives trying to earn it, often by abandoning their own knowing in the process.

But what if we didn’t have to prove anything?

What if your lived experience, your questions, your scars, your joy, and your remembering were enough?

The Cost of a Life Lived by Outside Approval

We don’t just lose our voices when we give our power away—we lose our compass.

We second-guess ourselves. We stay small. We wait.

We hesitate to speak up in a meeting.

We ignore the whisper that something’s not right in a relationship.

We keep quiet when a system is failing—because someone more “qualified” hasn’t spoken yet.

And meanwhile, we’re living lives shaped not by truth, but by the fear of being seen as wrong.

How many of us have lived whole decades trying to become acceptable in the eyes of people who’ve never walked a step in our shoes?

How much of our genius has been muted waiting to be seen as legitimate?

A Sovereign Voice

The path back begins here:

You are already the authority on your experience.

You are already wise.

You don’t need someone else to say it’s true.

You can speak without a microphone.

You can teach without a classroom.

You can share what you’ve lived—raw, unfiltered, beautiful—and let that be enough.

This doesn’t mean we reject learning or expertise or accountability.

It means we stop kneeling to it.

It means we stop assuming that truth only lives in books and institutions and professional voices.

It lives in you too. It always has.

Inquiries for the Returning

• What is the earliest moment you were taught that someone else’s opinion mattered more than your own knowing?

• Where in your life are you still performing for credibility rather than speaking from your truth?

• What truths have you quietly known for years but kept to yourself, waiting to be “ready”?

• How might your life shift if you saw yourself as already enough to speak, share, and lead?

This is not a rejection of wisdom from others. It is a reclamation of the wisdom within.

You don’t need a platform to be powerful.

You don’t need a credential to be real.

You don’t need permission to be true.

You are already credible—because you are.