On Saying I Don't Know

There is an unspoken expectation in this line of work that the practitioner always has something. That every question receives an answer, every silence gets filled, every session delivers a revelation worth what was paid for it.

I broke that expectation early, on purpose, and it is the reason I still have a practice.

Where the temptation comes from

It is not usually dishonesty. It is discomfort. Someone is sitting in front of you having driven two hours, having thought about this for weeks, and you can feel how much they want an answer. The pull to produce one is enormous. And the vocabulary of this field makes it very easy to produce something that sounds like an answer: something about transitions, about a door closing, about a figure who is watching over you. It is warm, it is unfalsifiable, and it is worthless.

Worse than worthless, actually. People make decisions on what they hear in a reading. If I invent a comfortable shape and someone leaves a job, ends a relationship, or waits another year for something that was never coming, I have done real harm with a soft voice.

What I do instead

When something is unclear, I say so, and I try to be precise about how it is unclear. There is a difference between "I am getting nothing here at all," "I am getting something but I cannot tell whether it belongs to you or to the person you asked about," and "this is clear but it is not answering the question you actually asked." Those three are useful in different ways, and collapsing them into a vague reassurance loses all of it.

Sometimes the honest answer is that the question is not readable yet — that the situation genuinely has not settled into a shape. Saying that is not a failure. It is the most accurate thing available, and accuracy is what people are actually paying for.

The counterintuitive part

I expected honesty to cost me clients. It did the opposite. People who have sat with other readers tell me the same thing, almost word for word: the moment I admitted I could not see something clearly was the moment they started trusting everything else I said.

That makes complete sense. If I never say "I don't know," then "I know" carries no information. The two words only have weight as a pair.

What this means for you

If you book a session with me expecting a complete, tidy answer to every question you bring, you may occasionally be disappointed. What you will get instead is a straight account of what is clear, what is murky, and what I genuinely cannot see — and the confidence that the clear parts really are clear.

I would rather send someone home with three solid things than thirty pleasant ones.