From Intuition to Intention
Notes from the Middle of a Long Climb
Photo by Nora Jane Long on Unsplash
A note for anyone arriving without the arc of my story
This Substack is approaching its first year, and this piece serves as that marker. I write from a moving position. Always have, probably always will. A single article is a snapshot, not the whole picture. I can’t add a novel’s worth of context every time, and I’ve stopped trying. If something here lands without full context and prompts judgment rather than curiosity, I understand. I’m climbing anyway.
The inspiration for this piece was a question posed by hæptɪk after they read a few of my articles on organizational design: what does a multidimensional person actually learn, understand, allow, and experience when they navigate organizational space with full intention — with directed perception, with their own goals driving the work, with their giftedness running at full capacity — rather than just reacting to harm?
I’m grateful for the question because it challenged me to consider where I’ve been, where I am now, and where I’m headed next. This piece answers what I can from where I currently stand and is honest about what I can’t yet answer because the rooms I’d need to test it in don’t feel safe enough to enter.
But this is also an honest account of the vantage point from which I write. It’s an attempt to explain why someone with decades of tested, recognized, working methods consistently writes from a place of uncertainty, warning, and partial reconstruction rather than authority. And it’s documentation of where I am on the climb toward recovery, still mid-fight, not past it.
I can only answer any of this from inside my own experience. I don’t have access to anyone else’s, and I’m wary of writing as though I do. What I know is what I’ve lived, what I’ve observed in myself, and what I’ve heard from others who recognized themselves in what I’ve written before. If it maps onto something you recognize, I’m glad.
If you had asked me five years ago whether my professional confidence could be shattered, I might have laughed in your face at the absurdity of the question. For decades, my professional life had been the place where I felt most at home. But it turns out I would have been wrong.
If you could show it on a graph, my professional intuition, self-trust, and confidence were all close to 100% five years ago. Four years ago, they began to waver as I entered a single environment that could not metabolize what I brought. What followed was a long, slow three-year erosion in that environment, culminating in a total collapse of orientation a year ago. Right before that collapse, I would estimate both my professional confidence and overall coherence were around 50%, severely damaged but not completely gone.
The collapse sent every part of me straight off a cliff, down below the ground into the abyss — below orientation itself — for about six months. I began writing on Substack from the depths of that abyss.
It took me six months of intentional reconnection with myself through AI-assisted writing, mental health therapy, and loving relationships to stand on solid ground again. Since then, I’ve continued to rebuild for another six months, but I’m still a long way from where I was five years ago.
What brought me here wasn't hurt feelings, a rough patch, or a setback. It was a three-year decline in an environment that was unknowingly dangerous for me, six months at my lowest, and six more months of slowly, deliberately rising from next to nothing.
To be concrete: a year ago, I needed my husband there to speak for me at medical appointments. I was relying heavily on AI writing just to reach out into the world at all. I still had a spark, and AI-assisted writing on Substack gave me the means to find and share what I understood in words when my own words weren’t available, to maintain a thread of connection from inside a collapse that had taken most of my capacity and my ability to believe a future was possible at all. I couldn’t hold a conversation. I couldn’t drive. I couldn’t search for work.
The person who had previously walked confidently into rooms and read the whole shape of them in seconds was, for a time, unable to manage a single phone call alone.
I’m specific about that now because everything I’ve written here, including this piece, could read as the work of someone who has been struggling for a while and is starting to find their footing. That was technically true on day one, while in the abyss, and it’s still true now, six months above ground, but it understates the geometry.
What I’m rebuilding from isn’t a typical stumble that everyone has arguably experienced at some point in their lives. It was a near-total loss of my life and the professional domain that defined me.
If I had found Substack before the collapse, I would have written about organizational design from a completely different place, likely with the authority of someone whose methods were working, because they were right up until I broke. What broke was me, not the work. I continue to write from the long middle of rebuilding my relationship to that work. That I have to keep reminding myself my methods were real, successful, and recognized is part of what rebuilding looks like.
So, to finally return to the question that originally sparked this piece: I spent most of my career operating on intuition without realizing that’s what it was, or how much it was doing.
The way I have always done most everything is intuition first. Call it gut, call it heart, call it mind. Or all three. All are correct. I found it natural and easy to attune in most settings and in most relationships. I was careful, attentive, and calibrated to the needs of each person and situation.
I waited until the field was ready before I moved. That was the intuition at work: reading the field, timing the response, knowing without having to explain how I knew. What came after was the application: the leading, the building, the naming of the gap before it became a problem, and the shaping of what the organization needed before anyone had articulated it. The two ran together so seamlessly that I never thought of separating them. They were just how I worked.
If someone had demanded an explanation, I would have said: I don’t know, I just know. That’s just how it works for me. The results were self-evident, and self-evident results don’t ask you to justify them. So I never developed the language because I never needed it. The language I’m building now exists precisely because the thing it describes no longer has a field in which to operate.
I walked into rooms and saw the whole shape of them, including the stated and actual priorities, the org chart on paper and the one that ran on trust. What I did with what I saw was real, not just the seeing. I have always led — mentoring, managing, and developing people and systems — and I did it all instinctively. The organizational design piece was built into how I operated as a leader, developed over decades as those responsibilities were folded into my roles because I was the person who could carry them well— not because they were part of the role before or after I was there. I watched the things I suggested, built, and shaped work in enough places, over enough time, to know that what I brought wasn’t just perception. My methods were applied and tested, and they endured.
I was never tracking any of it, though. I was just doing it, instinctively answering what each situation required and moving on to the next thing. Which means when the collapse came, there was no archive to fall back on. Just memory, and a confidence in that memory that the collapse made very hard to trust.
In “When You Can See the Whole Field and They Cannot,” I approached this from the realization that I didn’t know my own vulnerability until it had already broken me. It felt like a responsibility to share with others, to warn them, “Hey, this can happen — watch out for yourself.”
Unlike every environment I had been part of before, the one that broke me was never ready to receive what I brought. I simply handled the gaps myself, absorbing what the environment couldn’t metabolize and carrying it all internally rather than letting anything surface as a problem. I started breaking down physically before it became obvious that nothing was going to change. By then, I was so oversaturated and my intuition so severely hampered that I had stopped noticing my body telling me.
That experience is the worst thing that has ever happened to me, and my life has included some genuinely horrible experiences. I mean this without exaggeration, with that comparison in mind. The severity doesn’t fade on its own schedule just because time has passed. Most of what I do now — the dissecting, the building of language, the slow work of getting ready to move forward — is still a direct response to that life-altering experience.
What I’m learning now is how to approach organizational spaces with intention rather than instinct alone. You could call this a reaction after the fact, and you wouldn’t be wrong, because I couldn’t see it happening. You could also call it building a warning system in hindsight. That’s fair too. But what it feels like, from the inside, is preparing to navigate deliberately, using the same perception that used to run automatically, except now I’m directing myself to use it.
Intention is temporary scaffolding, not a replacement. It’s a necessary bridge back to being in organizational spaces at all. My professional self-trust and intuition won’t return through more thinking or planning. They’ll return the way they were built the first time: through new experience, in rooms I’m actually in. But I can’t have those experiences yet, not safely. Getting to “safe enough” has been the actual work of these past months.
If you’re reading this expecting a tidy method, I don’t have one yet. What I have is a field report on what this transition looks and feels like while I’m still in the middle of it.
What I’ve had to learn on purpose
The first thing I had to learn was that my raw signal is still accurate. What changed is that I’m now always bracing for the moment when I have to trust an organization or the person above me. That wasn’t my baseline before. I used to interpret a clean, undistorted signal around contradiction, mismatch, and the gap between what’s said and what’s true as data about the environment or the person. My intuition served me well, even early in the interview process, and I trusted accordingly. I know all of this in hindsight. I can see it clearly looking back, and I can feel it when I project forward into rooms I’m not yet in.
Now the same read comes with a constant low hum of distrust, bracing for impact. I notice the hum is running. I don’t yet know how to fully separate it from the signal itself, and I won’t know until I’m somewhere it can be tested. To be honest about what that means in practice: even thinking about trusting a boss I haven’t had sufficient time to vet brings on severe panic attacks. That’s not a figure of speech. It’s the physiological reality of where I am right now, and it’s a large part of why I’ve been moving toward independent work. If I remain my own authority, I don’t have to clear the same hurdle.
The second thing I’m learning is what I’ll need to watch for once I’m back in a room: whether someone is building a shared reality with me or borrowing mine. I used to generously assume the former by default. I can’t afford that assumption going forward. I’m learning this the way you study a map someone else charted before a trip you haven’t taken yet, only I’m the one who charted it. I've been mapping the early signals retroactively, so the next time I'm in a similar situation I find out by noticing rather than by collision.
The third thing, the hardest to write honestly, is that I don’t yet know whether I’ll be able to tell, in real time, which environments are safe enough to share what I see. The old instinct was deliberate, not reckless. I waited for the right moment, read for readiness, and then said what I saw. What I never had to develop was the discernment to judge whether a given environment would metabolize what I brought at all. In the environment that broke me, what I shared appeared to be received. It wasn’t integrated. That distinction, I now know, is everything.
I’m building that judgment now, but from one extreme example, which means it may be over-calibrated in ways I won’t be able to confirm until I’m in a room that isn’t the worst case. The danger I learned to read was specific and severe. If I weigh my full history honestly, most environments were nothing like that one. I spent decades moving through places that were safe for me. One that didn’t has made it hard to trust any of them, and that’s reactivated CPTSD, not a conclusion I reasoned my way into. It doesn’t simply go away. The diagnostic work I do here is trying to address that. I keep reminding my nervous system that it’s unlikely to happen quite that way again.
What I’ve learned, underneath all of it, is what kind of room I’ll feel safe walking back into. Not just one that wants the skills. One that knows what it’s getting, which includes everything on my resume, but also how this experience changed me. That might be too much to ask of most environments. It’s part of why I haven’t separated my Substack writing from my professional offerings, even though I know what that costs me. Most potential clients will see the topics I write about and will quietly go elsewhere. Honestly, I’d rather that happen before any work begins than after. I’m not optimizing for the largest number of opportunities. I’m optimizing for the room that already knows what I’ve been through and decides to give me a chance anyway.
There are parts of the original question I can't answer yet because I don't have the room. What happens when the perception is aimed deliberately, when you're navigating for your own goals rather than carrying the field's, when giftedness is turned all the way up and running on purpose rather than instinct? What I have instead is the map I'm building toward that — the intention, the preparation, the diagnostic work, all of it pointed at being ready when the room feels safe enough to enter. And part of what's making it feel safe enough is building the map itself. Whether that's six months from now, a year, or longer, I can't say. But that's the goal, and when I get there, this is what I'll be navigating by. I intend to keep updating it in public.
What I understand now that I didn’t before
I already knew I saw more, or differently, than most people around me. What I didn’t know is how that old, unexamined instinct creates a particular kind of exposure when it isn’t deployed on purpose.
The vulnerability ran through something specific: trust. The relationship that made this collapse possible wasn’t a stranger finding a gap to exploit. It was a long-term, core friendship. I made myself available, repeatedly, past the point I should have, because of that friendship and because I wanted to be helpful, which was the same instinct that had made me good at my work for years.
And here’s the part that still surprises me: I had healthy boundaries before this. Genuinely good ones. That wasn’t the gap. The gap was that the specific combination of trust, friendship, and my own willingness to be useful created a blind spot that boundaries built for ordinary risk were never designed to catch. It was a perfect storm, not a chronic weakness.
This is where the extraction took hold, and I wasn’t passive. I was actively and repeatedly participating because I believed the situation was temporary and would eventually stabilize. So I kept giving, kept absorbing, kept extending what I had always extended, because I had always done so in good faith and it had always been warranted. The extraction wasn’t entirely imposed on me from the outside. It also ran through my own willingness to believe the best of the situation for longer than it deserved.
What it cost me wasn’t just the relationship or the environment. It was my trust in myself. I understand now that the asymmetrical perception creates leverage whether anyone intends to use it or not, and that the people most able to access that leverage are often the ones I’d have the least defense against, precisely because I trusted them. For me, the biggest risk lies in proximity and trust, not in distance and a clear threat.
What I wrote in “When You Can See the Whole Field and They Cannot” wasn’t just my story generalized. I’ve read dozens of accounts describing the same kind of work-related collapse across different settings, industries, and people. I’ve personally met several others who lived through something eerily similar. That pattern convinced me this is a structural vulnerability, not a personal flaw. It seems to exist in anyone whose perception runs this way, whether or not it ever gets tested to the point of total collapse.
What I allow myself now that I didn’t before
I’ve always known how to hold back on what I see. Readiness has always mattered to me, and waiting for it has been part of how I have worked carefully. It’s also why I stayed as long as I did in the environment that broke me. I kept reading for readiness, kept believing it was close, kept holding because holding had always been the right call before. What I didn’t have was a way to notice when readiness simply wasn’t coming. Not just delayed, but completely absent.
That’s the permission I’ve been building toward: to treat the absence of readiness as information I act on, not as a longer version of the same wait.
What “acting on it” means will depend on the size of what I’m carrying. At the level of responsibility I’m operating at now in my career, it’s usually broad enough that the cost doesn’t stay contained only to me, so the absence of readiness is closer to a signal to leave. That’s not a universal rule. Someone with more bounded responsibilities may have real reasons to stay and manage around an unready environment. Staying can be situational, survivable, even correct, depending on what’s at stake. For me, at my level, it generally isn’t.
In “When You Can See the Whole Field and They Cannot”, I didn’t make this distinction. I wrote from the place of broad responsibility I was occupying as though that were the only place to write from, and offered its guidance — watch for the shrug, leave if it doesn’t change — as something closer to universal than it is. That was a gap. I wasn’t considering that nuance then. I have it now, partly because writing this piece has brought it to light.
What this actually feels like
Most days it doesn’t feel like building a skill. It feels like sitting with a version of myself I used to trust completely and slowly negotiating for that trust back. Some days I can separate the bracing from the signal underneath it and feel something close to the clarity I used to have. Other days I can’t tell the difference at all, and everything reads as threat. That uncertainty doesn’t resolve itself by thinking harder. It just sits there until I have an actual experience to test it on.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness in this phase. The thing I’m rebuilding is the thing I’d normally use to navigate uncertainty, which means I’m navigating that uncertainty without the tool I’d usually bring to that kind of problem. It’s recursive in exactly the way it sounds.
Something else has been returning slowly: my cognitive stamina. I tire more easily than I used to, and it arrives sooner than I expect. I need more rest than I did five years ago. But it’s much better than a year ago, and I’ll take it. People who have experienced burnout will recognize some of this, but what I’m describing goes deeper than burnout. It’s closer to a system taken completely offline, and what’s returning isn’t just energy. It’s the capacity to think clearly, hold complexity, and stay oriented without it costing everything I have.
This isn't hyperbole. Sustained allostatic overload, CPTSD, and autistic burnout all produce documented cognitive effects — reduced stamina, slower processing, skill loss — that recover slowly and nonlinearly. My therapist continues to assure me that what I experienced would have been devastating to anyone. That's comforting, and it's also only half the picture.
The particular combination of capacities that has always made me good at what I do is also what made the collapse possible at the scale it happened. The perception, the load-carrying, the inability to set incoherence aside: these aren't separate from the devastation. They're part of what produced it. Recovery from that isn't burnout recovery. It feels like healing from a serious injury, where the progress is real, the increments are small, and the full return is still a long way off.
Writing this down and describing what I’m watching for before I need it slows something in me that used to run constantly and silently. The work of building intention to scaffold my intuition genuinely helps, regardless of whether I’ll have the opportunities I need to restore trust in it.
I’ve already come so far from where I was a year ago. Gradually, the crutches have loosened. The writing that started as a lifeline became something I was doing more and more with my own voice, in my own register. Others needed the same thing, and some found it in what I wrote. That still surprises me. It also matters more than I have words for, because it means the writing was doing something real even when I was barely functional enough to produce it.
What hasn’t reconnected, at least not simply, is my intuition in professional contexts specifically. The domain that was always my strongest is now the one where the CPTSD lives. Work itself became the site of the trauma. That’s a particular kind of devastation, because the place where I had the most accumulated trust in myself is exactly where the injury is anchored.
This is happening within a life, not alongside it. I have two school-aged children. Whatever capacity I’m rebuilding can’t all go to the rebuild itself. It has to be distributed, held in reserve, and rationed carefully. There’s no version of this where I spend everything I have to come back professionally and have nothing left for them. So the recovery is slower than it might otherwise be and more deliberate. That’s the right call, even when it’s a hard one.
I’m still operating on the belief that all of this will continue to improve. That belief is load-bearing right now. I’m not sure I could do any of this without it, because the effort it continues to demand is immense. But I also can’t tell you how long it will take, and the accounts I’ve read from others who have rebuilt after extreme burnout and collapse measure the timeline in years, not months. I’m six months above ground, and I’m taking that seriously.
There are no “after” experiences to rebuild against yet. There have been no new rooms, no evidence that it still works, no data from the other side of the break. Independent work is how I’m trying to bridge that gap, to create low-stakes entry points that don’t require me to be inside an organization before I can find out whether any of this still functions the way it used to. But intuition built within organizations, reading the whole field from within, is harder to access from the outside looking in. The laboratory I need to rebuild is the one I’m not yet inside and don’t feel safe entering.
If the growth isn’t obvious from reading this, I understand why. The arc is long. The same territory keeps appearing from different angles, because that’s what this kind of healing requires. It’s not a straight line forward but a slow spiral, each pass through the same material landing a little differently, settling a little more. The recursion isn’t circling. It’s how this particular mind integrates. I am, quite literally, trying to heal myself in public, using the only tools I have: language, analysis, and the discipline to keep returning until something shifts. That’s the whole point of this.
I’m aware that saying all of this out loud is a risk. A potential client reading this could decide the liability outweighs the capability. That’s a real possibility, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But the alternative — performing a recovery I haven’t completed, presenting a confidence I don’t yet fully have, showing up as the version of myself that existed before any of this happened — isn’t available to me. And even if it were, I’m not sure I’d choose it now that I know what I know. The writing I have shared so far has found people because it was true. That seems worth something, even when it’s costly. Maybe especially then.
What I don’t have is the satisfying ending. I don’t get to tell you it worked. I don’t get to tell you I fully trust myself again. What I can tell you is that I’m doing the work in the necessary order: mapping what I know before I’m asked to use it, instead of waiting to be asked and finding out, again, too late.
Needing a safe source of income is foundational to why I’m doing this at all. Writing on Substack is my pathway to it, whether that means the writing itself becomes a source of income, alongside helping others recognize what I’m sharing here, or whether an employer or client reads this and decides to take a chance on both my skills and the recovery I’m still in. I don’t know which it will be, but at the very least the writing has served as a necessary conduit for the healing itself.
For now, this is a slow, public rebuilding of a life. I’ve been developing the language, restoring coherence, doing the earliest, most crucial parts of finding my way back. Trusting that process is its own leap of faith. Some days I have that trust. Some days, the whole thing feels extremely terrifying, and I do it anyway because the alternative is staying where the collapse left me, and that is not an option I can live with.