Describing the Indescribable

The best ideas often start as vague, indescribable feelings. If you stay with them and try to describe them, they become clear—and sometimes, transformational.

We all know the feeling. You’re onto something—you can feel it—but you can’t say what it is yet. It’s not exactly a thought, not yet. It’s more like a tension in your mind. A foggy knot. If someone asked you what you were thinking, you’d shrug, or say “Nothing.” But you’d be lying. Something’s there. You just don’t know what.

That moment—right there—is the beginning of real thinking.

Most people don’t see it that way. They treat that foggy state as a stop sign. If you can’t articulate it immediately, it must not be worth pursuing. Or worse, they feel a little ashamed for even entertaining something so vague. So they do what people always do when something feels hard and uncertain: they reach for a shortcut. They let their brains replace the fog with a more manageable proxy. A cliché. A buzzword. A premature conclusion. Anything to stop feeling the discomfort of not quite knowing.

The result is that a lot of potentially original ideas get replaced by recycled ones before they even make it out of the womb.

But the strange truth is that the best thoughts start as the worst. The most valuable ideas are often the ones that begin life as a feeling you can’t describe. They start as friction, or fog. But if you stay with them—if you stay concentrated long enough, and try to describe what’s there—something remarkable happens. That foggy feeling starts to take shape. What was once indescribable becomes not just a sentence, but sometimes a solution. A concept. A way of seeing.

This isn’t some poetic metaphor. It’s a practical method. I’ve done it enough times to know it works. And I’ve failed to do it enough times to know what’s lost when I don’t.

A lot of people treat writing as a way to capture thoughts that are already fully formed. But that’s not how it works—not for me, and not for most people doing anything creative. Writing is a way to form the thought in the first place. It’s an act of translation—translating intuition into language. And like any kind of translation, it’s slow, messy, and full of false starts.

But it’s also how you get there. The moment you force yourself to write down what you feel—especially when it’s hard to explain—is the moment you begin to turn that gut instinct into something usable.

It’s tempting to wait until things feel clearer. To think, I’ll write once I know what I think. But clarity is often the result of writing, not the prerequisite. Trying to articulate a fuzzy feeling is like feeling around a dark room. You bump into things. You mutter to yourself. But eventually, you begin to map the space. You start to see the outlines of what’s there.

This happens in conversation too. I’ve noticed it when brainstorming with friends. Ideas come to me not because I had them all along, but because someone else’s presence pulls them out of me. The audience matters. Even if the audience is just one other person. Trying to explain something—especially something that’s still half-formed—forces your brain to choose. It can’t hide behind “I kind of know what I mean.” It has to commit to words. And in that moment of committing, something real gets born.

Sometimes I think the role of the listener in these moments isn’t even to give feedback. It’s just to exist. To be a surface the idea can bounce off of. You hear your own voice saying something and realize, Oh. That’s what I think.

This is why people pay therapists. Or write journals. Or pace around the kitchen talking to themselves. They’re not reciting what they know. They’re discovering it.

But here’s the key: it only works if you resist the urge to get rid of the feeling too quickly. That’s the real mistake. Most people treat discomfort like a bug. Something to eliminate. But the discomfort that comes from trying to describe something vague is actually a clue. It tells you that you’re on the edge of something worth finding. Something just outside your current vocabulary. Maybe even outside your current self.

In those moments, you can either retreat—or stay.

And staying is what makes the difference

So why don’t more people do this?

Why don’t they sit with the hard-to-name feelings and try to write them out? Why do so many promising thoughts die the moment they start to get interesting?

Because it’s uncomfortable. Not dramatic, cinematic discomfort—but a low-grade, ambient anxiety. A sense that you might sound stupid. Or that you’re wasting time. Or that you’re chasing something that isn’t even real.

And in a culture that rewards speed, clarity, and confidence, sitting there mumbling “I don’t know what this is yet” feels like failure.

But it’s not. In fact, it might be the only honest kind of thinking.

There’s a pattern I’ve seen over and over: the moment someone decides not to investigate a strange idea, or drops it because “it doesn’t make sense yet,” is often the exact moment when the idea could’ve become something. But because it didn’t arrive in full armor, they let it go.

The irony is that we’re all wired to avoid ambiguity. But in doing so, we also avoid originality.

Because clarity is what happens after you wrestle with the fog—not before.

This is why I think learning to describe your fuzzy thoughts is one of the most powerful skills a person can develop. Not just for writers, or thinkers, or “creatives.” For anyone who has ever been stuck. Confused. Restless. Anyone who has ever sensed that something inside them needed to be worked out—but didn’t know how.

If you can sit with that feeling long enough, describe it clumsily, revise it awkwardly, and keep pulling the thread—even when it looks like nothing—you will, eventually, find out what it was.

And the more you do this, the better you get. Eventually, the fog starts to cooperate. You build a kind of internal muscle. You begin to trust that there’s always something in there, even when you can’t see it yet. You stop needing every idea to arrive perfect. You stop flinching when the feeling is weird or half-baked. You just start writing.

This is how you become someone who can describe anything. Not because you’re smarter, or more articulate. But because you’ve trained yourself not to run from the first five minutes of confusion. You’ve practiced making language out of fog.

That’s what most people are missing. Not intelligence. Not insight. Just the patience to stay with a half-formed idea long enough to let it bloom.

The world isn’t short on ideas. It’s short on people who believe their vague feelings might be worth translating.

So next time you feel that “I-don’t-know-what-this-is” sensation, don’t run. Don’t file it away. Don’t smother it with a quick explanation. Just describe it—badly if you must. You can fix it later.

That strange little feeling you almost ignored?

It might be the best thought you’ve ever had.