Latest / She Survived: Stories of Courage, Recovery & Reinvention / Why Saying 'I Don't Know' Is Your Greatest Act of Honesty | She Survived
Transcript
- There is a specific kind of silence that falls over a room when someone finally stops pretending they have the map. It’s not an awkward pause; it’s the sound of a heavy stone dropping into still water. I want you to think about the last time you felt the need to lie. Not a white lie about where you left your keys, but a deeper, more structural lie. The kind where you nodded along in a meeting, or smiled at a friend’s crisis, or even just sat with yourself in the quiet of your own kitchen, and you said something like, 'I’ve got this figured out.' Or maybe you didn’t say it out loud, but your posture screamed it. Your shoulders were up by your ears. Your jaw was tight. You were holding up a sky that was slowly cracking. We are so conditioned to believe that knowledge is power. That if we know the answer, we are safe. If we can explain why things went wrong, we can prevent them from happening again. So we become curators of certainty. We polish our narratives until they shine. We memorize the scripts of other people’s lives because we’re terrified that if we stop performing competence, we’ll be seen as empty. As useless. As broken. But here is the truth I’ve learned after decades of sitting in rooms full of wreckage: pretending to know is exhausting. It is a full-time job with no benefits and no days off. When you try to hold the weight of being the expert, the fixer, the one who has it all together, you aren’t just carrying your own life. You’re carrying the expectations of everyone around you. And eventually, your back gives out. It always does. I remember a few years ago, I was consulting for a group of women who had recently navigated major career collapses. They were brilliant, sharp women, the kind who used to run departments and manage teams of fifty. Now, they were sitting in my living room, drinking tea, looking at me with these wide, frightened eyes. They wanted a roadmap. They wanted a five-step plan to reinvention. They wanted me to tell them exactly how to pivot, how to rebrand, how to get back on top. And I sat there, and for the first time in my life, I felt a strange sensation in my chest. It wasn’t anxiety. It was relief. Because I looked at their faces, and I realized I didn’t have the answers. Not because I wasn’t smart enough, but because their pain was unique, and their healing would be nonlinear, and because I couldn’t predict the future for them any more than I could predict the weather for next Tuesday. So I did something radical. I put down my notes. I leaned forward. And I said, 'I don’t know.' I watched the air leave the room. One woman started crying. Another let out a laugh that sounded like a sob. In that moment, the pressure valve popped. The expectation that I was the oracle dissolved. And what replaced it was something far more potent: presence. I wasn’t the guide anymore. I was just another human being, sitting in the dark with them, willing to admit that the darkness was real and deep and unknown. When I talk about saying 'I don’t know,' I’m not talking about laziness. I’m not talking about avoiding responsibility or shirking the hard work of figuring things out. What I’m talking about is intellectual honesty. It is the courage to look at the complexity of a situation and refuse to simplify it just to make yourself feel better. It is the refusal to offer a platitude when the reality is messy. Think about how many conversations in our lives are ruined by premature closure. A friend tells you she’s struggling with her marriage, and instead of listening, you immediately offer advice based on what worked for your cousin in 1998. You close the door before you’ve even opened it. You prioritize being right over being connected. You prioritize speed over depth. Saying 'I don’t know' keeps the door open. It invites curiosity. It says, 'Your experience is too complex for my quick summary. I want to understand it, but I need to start by admitting I don’t have the full picture yet.' This is not weakness. It is a profound respect for the other person’s humanity. It acknowledges that their life is not a puzzle to be solved, but a story to be witnessed. And when you do this, something magical happens. You give permission for the other person to be unsure too. You create a space where vulnerability is not a flaw, but a feature. Where it’s okay to stand in the middle of the fog and just breathe, rather than frantically trying to build a lighthouse before you’ve even seen the shore. There is a heaviness to certainty that we rarely acknowledge. When you claim to know, you lock yourself into a single narrative. If you say, 'This is definitely what happened,' then every new piece of information that contradicts that must be rejected, ignored, or forced into place. You become rigid. You become brittle. But when you say, 'I don’t know,' you remain flexible. You remain open. You allow the mystery to exist. And mystery is where growth lives. You cannot grow in a box that you’ve built yourself. You can only grow in the spaces between what you think you know and what you are beginning to sense. I’ve found that the most transformative moments in my own recovery came not when I had the answers, but when I stopped asking them. There was a period when I was grieving a loss that didn’t make sense. For months, I tried to find reasons. Why now? Why me? What lesson was this? I tortured myself with questions that had no answers. And then, one day, I just stopped. I sat on my porch and said to the universe, 'I don’t know. And I’m going to sit here with that not knowing.' It felt like letting go of a rope I’d been gripping so tightly my hands were bleeding. But as I let go, I didn’t fall. I floated. I began to notice the small beauties I had missed while I was busy searching for meaning. The way the light hit the trees. The taste of the coffee. The sound of birds. The turning point wasn’t a revelation. It was a surrender. And in that surrender, I found a peace that logic could never provide. So how do we practice this? How do we stop performing and start being? It starts with noticing the urge to fill the silence. Next time you’re in a conversation and someone shares something difficult, resist the impulse to fix it. Resist the impulse to share your own similar story unless it truly serves theirs. Just listen. Let the silence stretch. And if you feel the need to speak, try saying, 'That sounds incredibly hard. I don’t know what to say, but I’m here.' Notice how different that feels. It’s honest. It’s humble. It’s real. You are not offering a band-aid; you are offering your company. And often, that is exactly what is needed. Also, practice saying 'I don’t know' to yourself. When you catch yourself spinning a narrative that makes you the hero or the victim, pause. Ask yourself, 'Is this true? Or is this just the story I’ve told myself so many times that it feels like fact?' Allow yourself to be confused. Allow yourself to be undecided. Allow yourself to change your mind without shame. This is not about abandoning intelligence. It’s about expanding it. True intelligence isn’t about having all the answers; it’s about knowing which questions matter. It’s about having the wisdom to recognize the limits of your own perspective. And in a world that demands instant opinions and hot takes, choosing to withhold judgment until you truly understand is a revolutionary act. You are allowed to be a work in progress. You are allowed to be a question mark. And you are allowed to trust that even in the not knowing, you are held. You are supported. You are loved. Not for what you know, but for who you are. Take a breath. Let your shoulders drop. You don’t have to have it all figured out today. In fact, I hope you don’t. See you next time, darling.