From Confusion to Clarity: How to Trust Your Fire When Nothing Makes Sense

There were several times when everything just felt unclear. When I left Elks Rehabilitation, I felt so lost. I had started feeling the burnout badly when I was tied to a desk helping with the MDS assessments. Everything had to be perfect. I was starting to make errors and everyone knew something was wrong. I had more work and responsibilities, but I was also seeing the dead in the hallways—and I didn't know what to do about it. It was a very lonely time.

I kept trying to tell my supervisor that I was really struggling, but we kept missing each other. I finally got into a pissing contest with a doctor about discharging a patient who may have been having heart issues. I remember losing my shit and going home and laying in a fetal position, just crying my heart out. This lasted for several days.

It's been the same story since I got fired. I would go back to that anger and hurt, and they felt about the same intensity. I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to do next. I had been an RN for so long that I couldn't imagine what else I wanted to do. Be an artist? That didn't pan out financially. Housecleaning doesn't pay the bills, especially with my spending habits. I was drinking a lot.

It's hard to make that final decision about moving on. Your body and heart are breaking down, but that logical mind just won't let you take the jump. You fight it and just don't see where the landing place is.

When Clarity Becomes a Prison

We're all told to have a plan before moving on to another job, another home, another way of being. But what if the moment of clarity never comes and you're forced into following the path you were placed on this planet for? What if that choice is made for you, without your consent? We sit in jobs we hate, waiting for clarity of purpose that never arrives because we're living so much in our heads that we decide not to decide. We look at all the options and can't make a final choice.

When I started nursing school, I thought I'd finally found my calling—my direction and purpose. It felt so clear to me. I was hit over the head to become a nurse when 9/11 occurred. I had been debating nursing school and arguing with my husband for two years, but 9/11 was the trigger I needed.

And it was so easy to get in. I took a test. That was it. I was accepted. I thought that because it was so easy, it was a sign of my calling—verified and sealed.

But the doubt never stopped. Every day when I was approaching the building, my stomach would start doing flips. My anxiety would wake me from sleep. I would think of something I forgot to document or report, and panic would set in. After I got my BSN, that restlessness and internal agitation just grew.

I started looking at alternative medicine as a way of treating myself. I tried meditating for a while, but that only worked temporarily. Pretty soon the noise got too loud for meditation to help. I wasn't sleeping well. I was drinking like a fish and chain smoking to address the anxiety about going back to work.

Working outside in my garden usually gave me the grounding I needed, but eventually my depression became so profound that even that wasn't helping.

The Body Knows What the Mind Won't Admit

I lived in my head way too much. My dad believed if you were crying, he would give you something to cry about—so I learned to stuff my feelings deep inside.

But here's the thing: women and girls process their emotions through their bodies. As I've grown older, I can see this more clearly. By nature, women create. We create our living environment the way we want it. We take up crafts and hobbies that take us away from day-to-day stresses. There's a reason for empty nest syndrome—we're done chasing children around and suddenly there's nothing to do. So we create new things to keep ourselves busy, to fill that void. We start watching the breeze. We start watching the seasons and how we feel within ourselves.

Women naturally move to the cycles of the earth. We're connected to it.

Mental clarity is when your mind is so clear that you know what to do next. It's very task-related. Embodied knowing—you know down to your roots what you need to do next, without knowing why. When you're caught between these two—you have confusion.

But rather than get upset about feeling confused and not knowing what to do, what if we leaned into it?

Confusion as Sacred Doorway

That's where the dance is. When things are confusing, things are about to shift. To move. It's kind of like getting roto-rootered in your soul. That confusion forces us to make choices about whether or not to jump into the void. Staying in that confused space becomes so intolerable that we must jump. Confusion is a sign that we've outgrown the box we've let ourselves be stuffed into—we're expanding beyond our limits, just like a child with growing pains.

My body made the breaking point before my mind did. I'm a very strong-willed person and I kept ignoring the mental noise and the turmoil in my heart because I didn't know what the next chapter would be.

But then my back went out. And I was forced to evaluate some things. The first was: how do I return to work? I fixated on that and tried so hard to make my body cooperate, to no avail. I was still in pain when I did go back to work, because I wouldn't listen. I still forced the issue.

But then I got fired. And I've refused to go back to work so I can reflect on all this stuff. What do I want for the next phase of my life? I'm not going to go back to something that's no longer aligned with my body.

Finding Your Sacred Fire

I want to be fluid and graceful, like water. But I also want that passion—that fire. I want what lights me up. I want to squeal for joy when I wake in the morning. That's my fire.

Your Sacred Fire is not anger or destruction. It's about following what lights you up. It's about leaning into the joy of your innermost being. It's that place where you know you belong somewhere and you don't know why.

That fire also burns away what is no longer you—the useless baggage we all refuse to shed. It's the rocket fuel that propels you forward into your dreams.

When you stuff all the feelings and emotions deep inside, they stay there, building up into a powerful explosion of repressed emotion. When I blew my stack in the nursing huddle, I was actually speaking my truth—screaming it, really. I was declaring to everyone in the room and the heavens that I was done. I was done with the abuse, the disrespect. I had set a powerful boundary with the universe about what I was going to do for the rest of my life.

Was this an explosion of my sacred fire? I think so. I felt so abundant after the episode. I felt free. I had no idea what was going to happen next. It spurred me into looking into different areas outside nursing, looking for a place to land. The safe bet would be looking for another job, but that just puts me back into the system that created this impossible situation—going to another facility just to face the same level of bullshit as before. Now I'm free to explore who I am and to confront any fears about growing or staying stagnant in a career I hate.

Learning to Listen to Your Inner Compass

So how do we learn to follow our body wisdom? How do we know when it's giving us the correct feedback? How do we quiet our minds so we can listen to our inner selves?

Your inner compass is fueled by how your physical body feels about any question. If you feel a disembodied dread that you can't explain, if you feel resistance when talking about something, then it's probably not yours to do. This is called contraction—your body wants to withdraw from the stimulus.

When something is for you, it creates excitement. You wake up wanting to go for it. Things just open up for you. Your ribcage expands and you stand a little taller. Sometimes the signs are more subtle. I'm a rocker—if it's good, I start rocking forward and backward. I also start humming. This knowledge takes practice to recognize, so be patient with yourself.

When Your Fire Threatens Others

We all want to make those around us happy. It's very tempting to dim our light to make others more comfortable. When we do this, we're telling our body that we're wrong to feel the way we do. As this continues, as we keep overriding our internal compass, we lose sight of who we really are and our light starts to dim.

People are afraid of you changing into your whole self because they don't know where they'll stand in your life. Are you going to leave them alone? Sometimes they just feel threatened.

My husband is a case in point. I've wanted to quit and do something else for so long. He's older and retired from a good-paying government job that he loathed. But as an RN, I made more than he did, so every time it came up, he would play the security card. After I got fired, he's been supportive of me finding something else to do. He says he believes in me and that I can pull it off.

The Spiral Nature of Clarity

Clarity doesn't just happen. It occurs in stages as we're willing to let go. It's like painting—you have to lay down layers to get good coverage. We revisit various themes from different episodes of our lives. When those times repeat themselves, it just means we have another thing to learn, not that we've regressed. It's like being on a spiral staircase. You can't see that far ahead, and you don't know who you'll meet on your way up. But when you don't try to control the journey, new areas and opportunities open up and we find new interests and possibilities. And you know which new possibilities are yours and which ones you need to let float on by. Your body knows.

Emergency Practices for Peak Confusion

When things get really confusing and overwhelming, just stop. Breathe. Feel into your body and see how you feel. Follow the good feelings—that's your path. Return to what you know that you know that you know, deep in your bones. Try dipping your toe into that pond and see how it feels. Investigate what you value and make your choices based on those. Create rituals that speak to you and sing to your spirit.

The Dance Continues

Learning to trust your fire becomes a way of life, not a destination. It's an ongoing dance between knowing and not knowing. Your willingness to move through confusion is actually courage in action.

What became possible for me because I learned to trust my fire? Time with my grandchildren. Space to create art. The freedom to explore coaching and supporting other women in their own sacred rebellions. None of this would have been possible if I'd stayed in that hospital, slowly dying from the inside out.

The confusion I experienced wasn't my enemy—it was the doorway. It was my body's wisdom finally getting loud enough that I couldn't ignore it anymore. That uncomfortable, disorienting space was exactly where I needed to be to birth the next version of myself.

So I ask you: What is your fire asking of you right now? You don't need perfect clarity to begin. You just need to trust that the confusion itself is information. Your body knows the way, even when your mind is spinning. Permission to start before you're ready isn't just given—it's required. Because clarity doesn't come from thinking your way to the answer. It comes from dancing with the unknown until you find yourself on the other side, wondering why you waited so long to trust what you knew all along.