Learning to Sit with Uncertainty
Knowledge rooted in experience shapes what we know as well as how we know. ~ bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (1994)
In the Margins of My Journal - An Excerpt
Revisiting my reflection journal from my dissertation study, I paused at a page where I’d written maybe three times in the margin.
Maybe this code means something. Maybe I’m overthinking it. Maybe that silence was the most important part of the interview.
I remember staring at the transcript, cursor blinking, a faint hum of doubt in the background. I wanted the data to speak clearly—to tell me what it meant, to confirm that I was on the right track. Instead, it offered me hesitation, nuance, and half-formed ideas.
This is the part of research no one quite prepares you for: the moments when not knowing stretches longer than you expect. When clarity refuses to arrive on schedule.
The Weight (and Gift) of Not Knowing
In those moments, uncertainty feels heavy. It can sound like self-doubt or appear as procrastination. But through the years, I’ve come to recognize it as part of the work.
Qualitative Research—especially the kind that listens deeply to people’s stories—isn’t built on certainty. It’s built on interpretation, empathy, and time. Meaning doesn’t sit waiting to be discovered; it emerges through the slow process of thinking, questioning, and revisiting.
The sociologist Norman Denzin once described qualitative inquiry as a “performance of interpretation.” That phrase helps me breathe easier. It reminds me that my task isn’t to capture the truth once and for all—it’s to stay open to how truth shifts as I listen, write, and think.
Thinking With Theory
Stuart Hall wrote that identities are “never complete, always in process.” Lately, I’ve been thinking about analysis in the same way.
When I return to a transcript weeks later, I notice new patterns—not because the participant changed, but because I have. My questions have changed; my understanding of the world has shifted. This, too, is part of research: allowing yourself to evolve alongside your data.
Theories, then, are not cages to contain meaning—they’re companions that help us name what we notice. They try to give language to uncertainty without erasing it.
Sitting With the Slow Work - An Excerpt
Last night, I closed my laptop and stepped outside for a walk. This is becoming a pattern: close the laptop, leave the apartment, take a poet’s walk—as my mother calls it.
A walk that doesn’t begin with a destination, but serves as a journey—a space for thinking, for inspiration, and at times, a reprieve from the swirl of ideas.
Last night, that walk brought a quiet realization: Some questions don’t have readily available answers. Sometimes, they simply ask us to stay — to listen, to wonder, to wait. Questions can remain open. Their answers might arrive later—or not at all. And that’s okay.
This realization felt like a lesson:
That analysis in qualitative research is not a race toward clarity, but a practice of staying curious long enough for meaning to unfold.
A Note to Fellow Researchers
If you find yourself sitting in uncertainty today, take heart. You’re not behind—you’re in the middle of something becoming. Maybe your notebook is already full of question marks. Keep them. They’re evidence of your thinking, your care, your attention.
What if uncertainty isn’t a gap to close, but a space to listen more deeply?
📓 Notebook Prompt:
Write about a moment in your research when you didn’t know what came next.
What did that uncertainty reveal about you as a researcher?