The Courage to be Unclear: Finding Your Voice in the Fog of Becoming

We are conditioned to worship clarity—to equate certainty with success, to believe that understanding must always precede action. We think that if we could just get clear before we begin—on our purpose, our message, our niche—then everything would align. The right clients would appear. Our business would flow. We’d feel at peace in our work and confident in our place in it.

But for those of us in the work of wellness and transformation—those who are building a voice, crafting a business, or articulating a body of work—it rarely happens that way. You speak first, stumbling forward through fog, searching for the right words, only to realize much later that clarity arrived as a result of the journey, not as a prerequisite for it. You look back at what you’ve created and think, Ah, that’s what I was trying to say.

The Myth of Readiness

We tell ourselves that we’ll act when we’re ready—when the timing feels right, when the message has been perfected, when our website fully reflects who we’ve become. We call it alignment, but what we’re really seeking is permission. We want to know that if we begin, we won’t fail, that if we speak, we won’t be misunderstood, and that if we step forward, the ground will appear beneath our feet.

But readiness is not a state we reach before action. It’s a realization that only comes after we’ve already begun. You start, and then after a while you look back and see the conditions for forward movement were in place long before you believed they were. What you were waiting for was never more information or a clearer plan—it was courage.

Courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to move with it. The energy that feels like confusion is often just the early tremor of something new that wants to emerge—something that needs a lot of time and space to take shape. It feels disorienting because it hasn’t yet found its form, and our instinct is to try to think our way out of it. But you cannot map the terrain of becoming from the safety of the starting point.

We want to feel safe before we begin, but the safety we seek is born of beginning. Every time we move while uncertain, we prove to ourselves that we can survive uncertainty, and that evidence becomes the foundation of our trust.

Expression as the Path to Clarity

Clarity does not originate in thought; it emerges through expression. You don’t find your voice by thinking about what you want to say—you find it by speaking. Each attempt, each piece of writing, each imperfect articulation is a fragment of coherence, and as the fragments accumulate, a pattern begins to take shape.

That is how a body of work is formed: through hundreds of small gestures toward what feels true. When you look back over time, the thread that connects it all becomes visible, and you can see that clarity was forming in the background all along.

You don’t need to know where you’re going to begin. You only need to trust that expression itself will show you the way. Speak from where you are, write from the middle of your process, let your words reflect the immediacy of what’s alive in you now, not the perfected version you hope to reach someday.

Most of us are drawn to those who are visibly engaged in the act of becoming—those willing to share from within the fog, not just after it has cleared. In a world saturated with polished messaging thats absent of humanity, what stands out is not perfection, but honesty.

This is the courage to be unclear: to move before you are certain, to speak before you are ready, and to trust that every word you offer into the fog is a signal that will eventually guide you home.

Clarity will come, but only through expression. It’s what’s left behind by the courage to show up in the midst of uncertainty and say, Here I am. This is what I know so far.