How to Tell the Difference, How to Know, and When It’s Time

I can’t stop writing about this because you can’t stop asking.

I do Q&As all day, every day lately, and the questions are all basically the same. They tend to fall into a few categories.

The first is how to tell the difference between one thing and another. Is this a trigger or a red flag? Is this intuition or anxiety? Is this incompatibility or avoidance? Is this a boundary or am I being rigid?

Then there’s how to know. How do I know if my jealousy means something? How do I know if my anger is justified? How do I know if I’m settling? How do I know if I’m actually attracted to them? How do I know if this relationship is right?

The third, and maybe one of the most common: When is it time to end a relationship?

And then there’s grief, heartbreak, anxiety, longing, obsession: How do I make this feeling go away? How do I feel less?

Different questions. Same search.

People are looking for solid, black-and-white answers. They want me to say: 1 + 1 = 2. Here is the formula. Follow these three steps and you’ll know what to do.

And underneath that search is often an inability to tolerate uncertainty—or the belief that certainty and security are actually attainable if only some random stranger on the internet with 580k+ followers could tell you the secret to your life.

It’s interesting because I’m also a therapist. I hear versions of these exact same questions in my office all the time. The difference is that there we can spend an hour talking about them. We can get into someone’s history, their patterns, their relationships, their defenses. We can pay attention to what happens in their body as they talk. We can sit with contradictions instead of immediately trying to resolve them.

On Instagram, I get a tiny box and a few sentences.

But the questions themselves aren’t different. There are just so many more of them.

My therapy caseload is maybe 15–20 people. Online, I get hundreds of questions like this. Hundreds of people asking some version of: How do I know? How can I tell? When is it time? How do I make this stop hurting?

Which is why I can’t stop writing these articles.

It’s not like I’m sitting around trying to think of something to write to you about. This is the data I get from hundreds of thousands of people online. And the data keeps telling me the same thing:

We are desperate for someone to give us certainty about experiences that are inherently uncertain. We are desperate to feel less. With all of that said, I am going to try nonetheless to answer these questions. I will tell you how and when.

Want to know the secret?