Sometimes Clarity Looks a Lot Like Unraveling Yarn
I was unraveling yarn recently, which sounds like a pretty simple thing to do until you're sitting there with a pile of knots in your lap wondering how something that is literally one long piece of string has somehow managed to become so complicated.
You know there is an end somewhere, and you know logically that if you keep working at it long enough, all of those knots and loops and pieces wrapped around each other can eventually become one long, usable strand again, but when you're sitting in the middle of it and every piece you loosen seems to reveal another knot underneath it, it mostly just looks like a mess.
As I sat there working on it, I started thinking about how familiar that feeling was and how much the process reminded me of trying to find clarity during those seasons when you know something needs to change but have absolutely no idea what that change is supposed to look like.
I think we tend to imagine clarity as a moment when everything suddenly clicks into place, almost as though one day we'll ask exactly the right question, read the right book, have the right conversation, or wake up with some completely new understanding of ourselves and suddenly know exactly what we're supposed to do next.
I would love for clarity to work that way.
Sometimes maybe it does.
But in my experience, it has looked a lot more like sitting with a tangled pile of yarn and slowly working through it one piece at a time.
Sometimes Pulling Harder Makes the Knot Tighter
My first instinct when something is tangled is to pull on it, because I can see the direction I want the yarn to go and it seems perfectly reasonable that if I just pull hard enough, eventually it should come loose.
Of course, anyone who has ever tried to untangle yarn, a necklace, Christmas lights, or pretty much anything else knows what usually happens when you do that.
The knot gets tighter.
I think I've done the same thing to myself when I've been trying to figure out what comes next, especially when I've already been sitting in uncertainty for longer than I think I should be.
I start feeling like I should have an answer by now, which turns into pressure to make a decision, which usually sends me looking for something concrete I can grab onto so I can finally feel like I'm moving again.
Maybe I need another job.
Maybe I should build a business.
Maybe I need a certification.
Maybe I should completely change directions.
Maybe I should go back to something I've done before because at least I know I can do it.
The problem is that when I'm grabbing at answers because I'm uncomfortable with not knowing, I'm not necessarily getting any closer to clarity. Sometimes I'm just pulling harder on the knot.
There are times when the best thing you can do with something tangled is stop pulling long enough to actually look at it, find where the tension is coming from, figure out what is wrapped around what, and notice which piece has just enough room to move.
Maybe that's a better place to start when we're trying to figure out our lives too.
Instead of demanding an answer to What am I going to do next?, maybe the first question is simply:
What's actually tangled here?
There Might Be More Than Yarn in the Knot
When you're trying to figure out your next chapter, the answer you're looking for is rarely the only thing you're dealing with, because by the time most of us reach that point, we've tangled our own wants and instincts together with years of expectations, responsibilities, experiences, fears, assumptions, and ideas about what our lives are supposed to look like.
There's what you're good at and what you're qualified to do, but there's also what you've always done, what other people expect you to do, what seems responsible, what pays enough, what makes sense based on your résumé, what someone at your age or stage of life is supposedly supposed to be doing, and what you're afraid people might think if you suddenly decide you want something different.
Then there are the expectations you've created for yourself, which can sometimes be even harder to separate.
I spent all these years building this career, so shouldn't I keep going?
I worked so hard to get here, so what does it say about me if I don't want it anymore?
If I change directions again, will it look like I can't stick with anything?
What if I choose wrong?
What if I start over and regret it?
Somewhere inside all of those questions is the much quieter question of what you actually want, and it's really not surprising that it can be difficult to hear it underneath everything else.
I've experienced that in my own career, particularly during the seasons when circumstances forced me to think about what came next. I've worked in nonprofit leadership, built a cookie business after a layoff, moved into corporate strategy, experienced another layoff, and eventually found myself building something new again, and for a long time I looked at those experiences as separate pieces I somehow needed to make sense of.
Which one was the real career?
Which experience was I supposed to build from?
Which direction would make everything I'd already done look like it had been part of some intentional plan?
The more I tried to force all of those experiences into one neat answer, the more tangled they seemed.
What has slowly helped me find clarity wasn't choosing one of those pieces and deciding the others didn't matter.
It was learning how to untangle them.
You Have to Loosen the Knots Before You Can See the Thread
One of the biggest shifts for me came when I stopped looking at each experience only through the lens of what it qualified me to do next and started asking what it had taught me about myself.
That sounds like a small difference, but it changed the way I looked at my entire career because suddenly I didn't need every chapter to lead directly into the next one in order for it to have value.
I could look back at my years in nonprofit leadership and recognize the parts of that work that energized me without deciding I needed to recreate that exact career. I could look at building a cookie business and see how much I loved creating something, solving problems, connecting with customers, and figuring out how to make an idea actually work without deciding that entrepreneurship had to be the only answer. I could look at corporate strategy and recognize strengths I had developed and things I'd learned about how I work without assuming that my next job needed to look exactly like the one I'd lost.
Once I stopped trying to decide which experience was the answer, I started noticing the things that existed underneath all of them.
I like figuring things out.
I notice connections.
I ask questions.
I see possibilities.
I like taking something that feels messy or overwhelming and helping make it clearer.
Those things had followed me through environments that looked completely unrelated on paper, and I couldn't really see that thread until I stopped pulling so hard on the individual pieces.
I think that's true for a lot of us.
Sometimes clarity isn't about discovering something completely new about yourself.
Sometimes it's about untangling everything else enough to see what has been there all along.
Sometimes You Have to Undo Something Before You Can Make Something New
There is another part of unraveling yarn that I can't stop thinking about, and I think it may be the part of the metaphor that matters most.
Sometimes the yarn you're unraveling used to be something.
It might have been a scarf, a blanket, a sweater, or something else that someone spent hours making, and now you're carefully pulling it apart until eventually the thing that existed before doesn't look like itself anymore.
There is something about that process that can feel almost wrong because someone invested time in creating it.
But unraveling it doesn't mean the thing you made was worthless.
It doesn't mean you shouldn't have made it.
It doesn't erase the time, effort, or care that went into creating it.
It simply means the yarn can become something else now.
I think this is one of the hardest parts of changing direction in our careers and our lives because sometimes deciding that we want something different feels like we're undoing something we worked incredibly hard to build.
Maybe you spent fifteen or twenty years building a career and becoming known for something.
Maybe you worked incredibly hard to reach the position you're in now.
Maybe you've built a business that other people look at and think is successful.
Maybe you've invested time, money, education, energy, relationships, and a huge piece of your identity into becoming the person you thought you were supposed to become.
Then one day you realize you're not sure you want it anymore.
That can feel incredibly wasteful.
But what if it isn't?
What if changing direction doesn't mean throwing away everything you've built?
Because when you unravel something made from yarn, you don't lose the yarn.
You still have the material.
The skills are still yours.
The experience is still yours.
The relationships you've built, the things you've learned, the mistakes you've made, the problems you've solved, the confidence you've earned, and even the things you now know you never want to do again are all still yours.
You aren't necessarily starting over.
You may simply be deciding to make something different with what you already have.
You Don't Have to Untangle the Whole Thing Today
When you're staring at a giant knot, trying to understand the entire thing at once can make it feel impossible, but if you can find one small section with a little room to move, you can start there.
You loosen that piece and follow it until you reach the next knot, and then you work on that one for a while.
Sometimes you realize you've been following the wrong strand and have to back up.
Sometimes you make progress quickly, and sometimes you spend an absurd amount of time working on one tiny knot that seems determined to stay exactly where it is.
But eventually something that once looked completely impossible starts to loosen.
I think we could give ourselves a lot more grace if we approached clarity the same way.
You don't have to figure out your entire next chapter today.
You might only need to figure out one thing.
Maybe it's recognizing what you know you don't want anymore, or admitting that something you've been telling yourself you should want doesn't actually matter to you. Maybe it's paying attention to the part of your work that consistently gives you energy, exploring the idea that keeps coming back, or finally acknowledging that the thing keeping you stuck isn't that you don't know what you want but that you're afraid of what choosing it might change.
You can pull gently on one question and see what moves.
Then you follow that piece until you find the next one.
Maybe This Is What Clarity Actually Looks Like
I'm becoming less convinced that clarity is something we're supposed to suddenly find and more convinced that it's something we slowly uncover as we separate who we are from everything that has gotten tangled around us.
Sometimes there probably is a lightning-bolt moment when you suddenly know exactly what you're supposed to do, and if that happens, wonderful.
But sometimes clarity looks much less dramatic.
It looks like sitting patiently with the knot instead of yanking on it because you're frustrated.
It looks like realizing that one of the things you've been carrying isn't actually yours.
It looks like loosening an expectation you've held onto for years.
It looks like recognizing a thread that has been running through your life for much longer than you realized.
It looks like undoing something you worked hard to build and trusting that doing so doesn't make the work you put into it meaningless.
And sometimes it looks like accepting that you still don't know what the finished thing is going to become, but you finally understand a little more about what you're working with.
If you're trying to figure out what comes next and everything feels tangled right now, maybe you don't need to force yourself to find the answer.
Maybe you just need to find one loose piece.
Start there, follow it for a while, and see what it teaches you about the knot.
Because maybe finding clarity isn't about figuring out exactly what you're going to make next.
Maybe it's about unraveling what you've already made long enough to see the possibilities in the yarn you're still holding.
Not sure which thread to pull first?
If you know something needs to change but you’re still trying to figure out what, my Next Chapter Journal was created to help you slow down, sort through what’s working, what isn’t, and what you might want to explore next.
You don’t have to figure out the whole knot today. Start with one thread.