Can you imagine me staring at a corner of the room, as if it contains the secrets of the universe? Just an uninterrupted gaze into nothingness. That, my friend, is the face of true contemplation. You may call it daze or confusion, but I assure you, it is just the mind stretching itself into a shape it has never taken before.
What I’m trying to say is that ‘confusion’ has a bad reputation, like yours truly. Generations before ours have treated it like a glitch in the system, a sign of incompetence, an embarrassing thing to admit, like yours truly. Saying “I don’t know” as a response to what our parents question about our lives feels like a tiny failure, a break in the armour of certainty we’re all supposed to wear. But what if confusion is just the mind’s way of saying, “something new is happening here.”
Psychoanalysis has long held that before we make a breakthrough, we enter a fog. We fumble, we feel lost. The world stops making sense in the way it once did, and it can feel unsettling. But let me propose this- confusion is perhaps a symptom of an impending shift.
Think about it- have you ever stumbled across an old journal entry or a slam book (depending on which generational alphabet soup you belong to) and cringed at how certain you once were? The self we are today had to grow through the disillusionment of that certainty. And that growth? It wasn’t a neat, logical process, it was messy, uncomfortable, and often, utterly confusing.
Psychoanalysis teaches us that confusion is not a failure of thought but a space of psychic movement (or the shift, as I’d like to call it). When a child encounters the unfamiliar, they don’t demand immediate resolution; they play with it, oscillate between knowing and not knowing, constructing and deconstructing meaning. Yet, as we grow, we become intolerant of this in-between state, rushing to clarity as if ambiguity is dangerous.
What if, just what if instead of fearing confusion, we could sit with it? What if we could treat it like a conversation rather than a crisis?
Freud, my good old friend, taught us that before meaning arrives, we often get disoriented. The ego resists change, after all, it likes the known, the named, the organized. But when the unconscious bubbles up with a conflict or a wish or a memory that threatens the current order, the psyche doesn’t offer clarity. It offers a rupture.
Psychoanalysis 101. I know, Karen!
When a conflict, wish, or memory bubbles up from the deeper terrain- one that the ego isn’t ready to see or say— it creates a ripple in the structure of our psychic order. Suddenly, what made sense yesterday doesn’t today. Words stumble. Thoughts wander. We find ourselves torn between two feelings that don’t quite belong in the same room. And the psyche, in its infinite wisdom, still doesn’t offer a crisp answer.
What I’m talking about is a feeling with no name, a mood that doesn’t match the moment, a fog where we once walked with certainty. You know those moments, don’t you?!
Like when we’re simply going about the day, but suddenly overcome with a wave of sadness— no context, no cue, just a soft ache that settles in. Or when we’re surrounded by friends, laughter echoing like music, and yet there’s a strange emptiness clinging to the edges of the joy. Or those quiet mornings when everything is fine— the coffee’s hot, the calendar’s clear— but we find ourselves inexplicably restless. These aren’t glitches. They’re signals. Whispers from within, my furrend.
The truth is, these quiet rebellions of the heart can’t be undone (and you know that!). They wait for us to pause your scrolling thumbs, our busy mind, our rush toward answers, & our clever wisdom is replaced with childlike ambiguity, and adult-like mistrust.
Perhaps, the next time we meet each other in the haze of not-knowing, you’ll find me in either of these:
🐾 Pawsing before you panicking. Instead of scrambling for an answer, can we notice what’s shifting inside? What assumption is being challenged? What old way of thinking is no longer working?
🐾 Not being a Karen. In times when confusion is a sign that we’re encountering something new, can we non-dramatically frame it as curiosity rather than catastrophe?
🐾 Resist. Always. Can we give ourselves permission to be in the process & not resist the urge to solve ourselves like a math problem?
🐾 Trust that clarity will come, when it’s ready. As a cat watching the world from the windowsill, sometimes all I to do is sit and let things reveal themselves.
And look, I get it. The urge to tidy up your confusion, file it under “Not Now,” and carry on with your to-do list is strong. But confusion doesn’t like being sidelined. Leave it unread too long, and it’ll start getting creative- showing up in the middle of small talk, hijacking the focus during meetings, or making us cry over an ad about butter. Confusions are anything but subtle. It wants airtime. Ignore it, and it’ll turn the inner life into a group chat we can’t mute.
P.S. So, if you’re feeling confused, congratulations. You’re someone in the making!
P.P.S. Does this make sense or now you’re just loving the confusion?!!
