When life no longer makes sense, we may not need another answer. We may need a different relationship with not knowing.
Sometimes the most difficult part of a life that no longer makes sense is not what has happened. It is that you cannot find a clean explanation for it.
You turn moments over in your mind. You revisit the conversation. You remember what was said and what was not said. You try to understand when things changed, whether you missed something, and why you did not see it sooner.
Perhaps a relationship you once trusted now feels unfamiliar. Perhaps a decision that seemed right no longer sits easily within you. Perhaps nothing is obviously wrong, yet something in you has become less willing to continue as you have.
And so you search.
What does this behaviour mean? What should I be looking for? Which red flag did I miss?
Someone once asked me what red flags women overlook most. My honest answer surprised her.
I do not think there is a list.
There is one red flag I will name, however.
Self-violence.
It is a strong phrase, and deliberately so. Self-violence is what we do to our own heart, mind, and body when we resist, when we want to be right, and when we live from our judgements and opinions. It can be the moment you silence or abandon your quiet inner guidance. The voice that holds the key to your beautiful life.
This does not mean every uncomfortable feeling is a warning, or that every fear is a truth. It means the way you meet yourself matters. When something within you is continually being dismissed, diminished, or argued out of existence, that is worthy of your attention.
Past that, I am not sure a universal list can help us.
What stops one woman in her tracks might not even register for another. What becomes impossible for us at one point in our life may be something we once accepted without question. We are not all standing in the same place. We have not lived the same life. We are not being asked to see the same thing at the same time.
Some truths only become visible when we have grown able to meet them.
If there is no list to memorise, what is there instead?
This is where the conversation about red flags becomes a conversation about something deeper.
Our relationship with not knowing.
We are often so uneasy with not knowing that the world has given us a way to close the gap almost before it opens. The moment a question arises, we ask. We may prefer not to sit with it. Not to wait. We turn to artificial intelligence, to ChatGPT, Claude, or Grok, and an answer arrives.
Not knowing is replaced almost instantly by information.
Read that sentence once more.
Not knowing is replaced by information.
And perhaps, more quietly, knowing itself is being replaced by information too.
Information can be useful. It can name patterns, offer language and show us possibilities we had not considered. But information cannot inhabit your life.
Knowing is not always a sentence that arrives fully formed. Sometimes it begins as a pause. A heaviness. A softening. A reluctance to say yes as quickly as you once did. A quiet awareness that the life you have been living no longer fits in quite the same way.
It may need time before it has language.
It may need stillness before it has form.
It may need you to stop demanding that it prove itself before you are willing to remain near it.
I remember my own first real encounter with this. It was the beginning of something, letting not knowing sit fully in my body instead of chasing it away with answers. Even now, there are days I catch myself back in that same quiet, resting in something I do not have an answer for yet, and needing none. We have given so much weight to intelligence, and so little to the plain wisdom of common sense. If you do not know, you are allowed to simply rest in not knowing.
There is a fear underneath all of this, and it deserves to be named honestly. What if we choose someone and they change in a year, or ten, or fifteen? What if the person standing in front of us now is not the person who will still be standing there later? I won’t pretend otherwise. We cannot guarantee any of that. No one can. That is the human condition, and no amount of certainty will remove it.
There is something we can do instead of chasing a guarantee, though. We can spend our life growing roots. Somewhere inside each of us is a seed of real knowledge, and if our attention rests there, tends it, returns to it again and again, it grows into something that does not need to know what is coming. A tree with deep roots does not panic when the wind moves through it. It bends. It stays standing. Not because it knew the wind was coming, but because of what it had already grown underneath.
So the next time you find yourself searching for the red flag you might have missed, maybe don’t reach for the list. Sit here instead, with me, in the not knowing. See what it feels like to let that be enough, just for now.