Liberation from the past, which I wrote about last time, does not happen through an intellectual decision. It happens through traversing a process that, before clarity, inevitably passes through a zone the mind detests: confusion. And precisely today's subject is this ignored and underestimated zone, total confusion as a necessary stage before any genuine clarity.
It is not a romantic or comfortable subject. But it is one I consider essential for anyone passing through a crossroads moment, in a relationship, in life, or in the relationship with the self.
What is total confusion? It is not ignorance or a lack of information. It is the state in which you have too much information, too many simultaneous perspectives, too many factors to consider, and no clear way to organise them. It is when you know something must change but do not know what. When you no longer know what you want, but you are certain what you have is no longer enough. When the questions are clearer than the answers and every decision seems equally possible and equally risky.
This state is normal. It is, in fact, a sign that you are processing something real, not that you are stuck.
Why do we avoid it so consistently? For a few reasons I recognise as fundamental.
The first is that confusion feels like danger. The nervous system, trained for survival, does not distinguish well between existential uncertainty and genuine threat. Both activate the same alarm. And so, at the first sensation of confusion, the mind seeks to resolve quickly, to find an answer, to anchor in something certain, any certain thing, even if that thing is not genuinely appropriate.
The second is social and cultural pressure for clarity. We are surrounded by a discourse that glorifies clarity, vision, exact knowledge of what you want. People who have found their mission, people who know exactly. There is no public space for the person in the middle of confusion who does not know. And so we hide it or rush it.
The third is that confusion requires tolerating discomfort without a clear expiry date. You do not know how long it lasts. You do not know whether it ends with a revelation or a pragmatic choice. And precisely this temporal uncertainty is, for many people, the hardest to bear.
What happens when you rush the exit from confusion? You choose the available solution, not the appropriate one. You return to what was familiar, even if familiar does not mean good. You make decisions from anxiety, not from clarity. And you arrive, a few months or years later, in the same confusion, because the rushed decision resolved nothing substantial.
I see this frequently in relationships. People who, in the middle of major confusion about a relationship, make the quick decision to leave or stay not because they have reached genuine understanding, but because they can no longer bear the state of suspension. And that decision, made from the need to end the confusion, does not produce the peace they sought.
How do you traverse confusion without rushing it and without losing yourself in it? A few practices I consider genuine.
The first is to name it. I am confused. I do not know. I am in the middle of a process. Simply acknowledging reduces the intensity of the state, because you stop fighting it and treating it as a problem to be immediately resolved.
The second is to reduce the pressure for immediate decision. Most important decisions that seem urgent are not. They seem urgent because anxiety presents them as such. If you give the process more time, the quality of the final decision is better.
The third is to ask fewer answers and pose more questions. In confusion, good questions are more valuable than premature answers. What do I not yet understand? What would help me see more clearly? What would need to happen for the decision to become obvious?
The fourth is to remain functional without pretending you have clarity. You can live and function in confusion. You do not need to resolve it to continue with the life around you.
Clarity, when it genuinely comes, is not the product of intellectual effort. It is a deposit of processing. It often appears suddenly, after a period of tolerated confusion, not resolved confusion. And precisely because it was tolerated, not forced, it has a different quality. It is a clarity you feel in the body, not merely one you understand with the mind.
Think about a period of confusion in your life that ended in genuine clarity. How long did it last? And did the clarity come from more analysis or from something else?
