For years, I admired people who always seemed to know what to do next. Now I think the stronger skill is being able to say “I don’t know yet” and not run from the discomfort.
In my twenties I thought mentally strong people were the ones who knew what they thought.
They had positions. They had plans. They could walk into a room and say what should happen next without flinching. They had a clear take on relationships, careers, money, politics, and themselves.
Watching them, I assumed that was what I was aiming at. If I read enough and thought hard enough and worked things out for myself, I’d eventually have that same kind of clarity, and then I’d be the steady one in the room.
It took me until my mid-thirties to notice that wasn’t quite right.
A lot of those certain-sounding people, the ones I’d taken as models, weren’t actually all that solid when something got hard. They had answers, but the answers were brittle. The minute reality didn’t match the framework, they’d reach for a new framework, or get angry, or shut down, or change the subject.
The ones who held up best, I started to see, were doing something different.
What I’ve come to notice
The people I now think of as mentally strong are usually the ones who can stay in not-knowing for longer than the rest of us.
When their life takes an unexpected turn, they don’t immediately have a take on it. They don’t rush to package the event into a story. They might say, “I don’t know what to make of this yet,” and actually mean it.
A week passes. A month passes. They’re still sitting with it, not because they’re frozen, but because they refuse to settle for a fake clarity that would make them feel better in the short term.
That, more than confidence, is what I now think strength looks like.
It’s not the absence of doubt. It’s the ability to live with doubt without needing to make it go away.
The same friend who calmly says, “I’m not sure what the right move is,” might also be running a complicated business or raising a difficult child. The not-knowing isn’t a weakness in them. It’s the thing that lets them keep their footing when everyone else is reaching for a story to hold onto.
The two exits we reach for
Most of us, when we land in uncertainty, reach for one of two exits.
The first is distraction.
The phone, the work, the next task, the drink, the show, the scroll. Anything that fills the space where the unresolved question is sitting. We tell ourselves we’re just decompressing, but if we’re honest, the activity is doing a job. It’s keeping the question from being heard.
The second is reassurance.
We start texting friends, asking opinions, posting on a group chat. We’re looking for someone to say the thing that resolves it for us. Sometimes we know what we want to hear, and we keep asking until someone says it. Sometimes we’re not sure what we want, but we know the asking itself is soothing.
Both can become forms of fleeing.
They look different from the outside, but they’re often doing the same thing.
The distraction person is running into something. The reassurance person is recruiting a chorus. Either way, the uncertainty isn’t being faced. It’s being managed away.
This is the hard thing I’ve had to admit about myself. A lot of what I used to think was coping was actually a sophisticated way of not staying with the thing.
Psychologists sometimes talk about this through the lens of intolerance of uncertainty: the tendency to experience uncertainty itself as threatening or unbearable. Research has linked intolerance of uncertainty with worry, anxiety, and avoidance, which makes sense to me. When not-knowing feels intolerable, almost anything that gives temporary relief can start to look like wisdom.
What staying actually feels like
The first time you really try to sit with an unresolved question, you find out how uncomfortable it is.
You feel the urge to pick up the phone. You feel the urge to ask one more person. You feel the urge to make a decision just to be done with the suspense, even if you don’t have enough information to make a good one. You feel the urge to numb out in some small way.
The mind is not naturally good at this. It would rather you do almost anything than continue to not know.
But if you can stay for a while, something shifts.
The question stops being an emergency. You can carry it around without it taking up all your attention. You start noticing things about it you missed when you were busy resolving it. The real shape of the situation slowly becomes visible.
Sometimes a decision arrives on its own, not because you forced it, but because the situation eventually clarified itself.
A lot of the worst decisions I’ve made in my life were made because I couldn’t tolerate the not-knowing for one more week. A lot of the better ones came because I made myself wait.
Why this matters more than it sounds like it does
Almost every important moment in an adult life happens inside some kind of uncertainty.
Should I stay in this job? Should I leave this relationship? Is something wrong with my health? Am I being honest with myself about this thing I keep avoiding?
These are the questions that shape a life, and they almost never come with the answer attached. They sit in front of you for weeks or months or years, asking what kind of person you’re going to be while you don’t know.
At least in my own life, the moments when I reached for premature certainty were often the ones I later had to unwind.
I made the call too early, or trusted the wrong reassurance, or buried the question in busyness until it showed up as something worse.
The better moments usually came when I could stay. When I could keep functioning while the answer was still missing. When I didn’t insist on a resolution before the real one was available.
Not because I was smarter. But because I waited long enough for the situation to show me more than my panic could.
The slow form of strength
I’m 37, and I’ve stopped admiring the people who always have an answer.
I admire, more, the ones who say, “I’m not sure yet,” and then go on with their day. The ones who can be in the middle of something hard and not need to perform either composure or distress. The ones who don’t text everyone they know after an argument with their partner. The ones who can hear bad news and not immediately have a position on it.
That kind of person is harder to spot, because they’re not doing anything dramatic.
They’re just staying.
They’re sitting at the kitchen table with a coffee and a question. They’re walking back from the school run with something unresolved in their chest, and they’re letting it be unresolved. They look ordinary because what they’re doing is invisible from the outside.
I’m still learning how to do it myself. But these days, when I meet someone who can say “I don’t know yet” without immediately trying to escape the feeling, I pay attention.
That, more than certainty, is what strength looks like to me now.
