Perplexity Was Just a Word Until I Lived It

I used to think “perplexity” was just a fancy word for confusion. A crossword clue. Something people slipped into conversations to sound more intelligent than they felt.

That changed the year everything in my life seemed to lose its labels.

It started quietly. A missed phone call I didn’t return. A job application I didn’t submit because I wasn’t sure I wanted it. A coffee date with a friend that felt more like an obligation than something I was looking forward to. The small things, the ones you think don’t matter, until you realize they’re the threads holding your days together.

Then came the bigger unraveling. My mother’s voice over the phone telling me she had “something important” to share. The long silence before she said she was moving across the country, not for work or for family, but for herself. “I need to live my life without worrying about yours for a while,” she said.

I didn’t know how to answer that.

Around the same time, the person I’d been seeing someone I thought I might actually build a future with decided we weren’t “aligned.” No argument. No final dinner. Just a message, polite but final.

Suddenly, my life was a room with the furniture pushed to the edges. I didn’t know where to sit anymore.

That’s when “perplexity” stopped being a word in a dictionary and became the way I woke up each morning.

I thought I could fix it by moving things around. I took a weekend trip. I bought new clothes. I even dyed my hair darker, thinking maybe a change on the outside would force something inside to shift. But no matter what I did, the same feeling waited for me at the end of the day: the weightless kind of lost.

One evening, after another failed attempt at making plans I didn’t actually want to keep, I sat on my balcony and watched the city lights flicker on. From up high, everything looked orderly grids of streets, windows lined up like stitches. It made me wonder if maybe my life looked fine from the outside too, even if the inside was chaos.

That thought stayed with me. Maybe perplexity wasn’t just about not knowing what to do. Maybe it was about realizing you no longer recognized the person making the decisions.

The shift came slowly, like dawn.

I stopped asking, “What’s wrong with me?” and started asking, “What if nothing’s wrong?”

Instead of forcing plans, I let the days be quiet. I read books I’d bought years ago but never opened. I started taking long walks without a destination. I cooked for myself, just for the act of it, not to impress anyone.

Some people noticed the difference. A friend told me I seemed “calmer.” My mother sent me a photo of the ocean from her new city with a simple caption: I think you’d like it here.

One night, lying in bed with the window cracked open to let the summer air in, I thought about that word again perplexity. In all my reading, I’d learned it came from the Latin perplexus, meaning “entangled” or “confused.” But it also carried the sense of being woven together in a complicated way.

Maybe that was the point. Life wasn’t about cutting yourself free from the tangle it was about finding a way to move within it, to accept that some knots were meant to stay tied.

I still don’t have all the answers. My mother’s new life is still strange to me, and I’m still single in a city that feels too big some nights. But I don’t wake up feeling weightless anymore. I feel… rooted, even if the soil is unfamiliar.

Perplexity is still part of my life. The difference is, I don’t treat it like an intruder anymore. It’s a guest that sits quietly in the corner, reminding me that not knowing is just another way of being alive.