Over the last twenty-plus years of having this conversation—watching people wrestle with their inner lives, question their assumptions, and occasionally glimpse something quieter underneath—a phrase comes up again and again.
“I feel like I’m coming out of a fog.”
Not metaphorically. Not poetically. Viscerally.
People describe it as though something that once felt heavy and enveloping has thinned. As if the world hasn’t changed, their life circumstances haven’t dramatically improved, and yet something fundamental about how experience is being processed is different.
They aren’t suddenly happy. They aren’t free of challenges. But they’re no longer reacting to their thoughts as if those thoughts are reality itself.
And that distinction—simple as it sounds—changes everything.
This experience sits squarely within the broader pattern explored in the hub article on why clarity often feels harder the more we understand. What follows here is a closer look at what that “fog” actually is, why it can feel so consuming, and what people are noticing when it begins to lift.
The Fog Was Never the World
One of the most disorienting aspects of this shift is the realization that the fog was never out there.
Life may still be complicated. Relationships still require navigation. Bills still need paying. Loss, uncertainty, and effort haven’t disappeared. And yet, people often report a strange clarity beneath it all—as though the ground was always there, even when it felt impossible to see.
The fog, it turns out, wasn’t life itself.
It was thought about life.
This is not an intellectual realization at first. It’s felt. A loosening. A subtle decoupling between what’s happening and what’s being said internally about what’s happening.
For the first time, thoughts are seen as thoughts.
Not commands.
Not prophecies.
Not reality itself.
Just mental activity responding to perception, memory, and conditioning.
When Thought Stops Masquerading as Reality
Before this shift, thoughts tend to operate invisibly. They comment, interpret, predict, and warn—but because they’re constant, they’re rarely questioned. They feel authoritative simply because they’re present.
“This is bad.”
“I’m falling behind.”
“Something is wrong.”
“I’m not okay.”
When these statements arise internally, they don’t announce themselves as thoughts. They present as facts.
And when thought is mistaken for reality, the nervous system responds accordingly. Panic can arise even when nothing immediate is wrong. A sense of being lost can appear even with solid ground beneath one’s feet.
People describe feeling buried while everything else is fine.
This is the fog.
Thought as a Second Challenge
Life already brings challenges. Situations require response. Circumstances change. Loss and uncertainty are unavoidable.
But when thought is taken as reality, a second layer of difficulty is added on top of whatever is already happening.
Thought doesn’t just respond to life—it extrapolates, assumes, and catastrophizes. It creates imagined futures, replays the past, and fills the present with meaning that hasn’t actually been verified.
This is why someone can feel overwhelmed on a perfectly ordinary day. Why anxiety can surge without an external cause. Why a person can feel utterly lost while everything necessary for functioning is still in place.
The challenge isn’t life alone.
It’s life plus unquestioned thought about life.
And that second challenge can be far heavier than the first.
Panic in the Fog
When people are lost in this fog, they often describe a kind of internal desperation. A praying—not necessarily to a god, but to anything that might bring clarity.
They look for answers. Explanations. Diagnoses. Techniques. Something external that might finally cut through the confusion.
And from inside the fog, that makes sense. If thought feels like reality, then more thought seems like the solution. Better thinking. Clearer thinking. Correct thinking.
But what’s quietly being overlooked is that thought itself is the medium through which the fog is being generated.
Trying to think your way out of it is like trying to see through fog by adding more fog.
The Moment the Fog Thins
What people describe when the fog begins to lift is not the arrival of new information.
It’s a reorientation.
Thoughts don’t stop. Life doesn’t become silent. But there’s a subtle shift in relationship. Thoughts are seen from rather than seen as.
A thought arises:
“This is dangerous.”
And something else notices:
“That’s a thought.”
Not as a mantra. Not as a practice. Just as a fact.
And in that noticing, the spell weakens.
The nervous system responds differently when thought is no longer treated as a direct representation of reality. Space opens. Options appear. The urgency softens.
Nothing magical has happened.
But something deeply human has been recognized.
Why This Feels Like Waking Up
Many people hesitate to use the word “awakening” because of its cultural baggage. But the reason it persists is because it captures the felt contrast.
Before, experience was immersive and unquestioned. Thought and reality were fused. After, there’s differentiation. Perspective. Room to breathe.
It feels like waking up because it is a shift in perception—not a belief, not a philosophy, but a change in how experience is being interpreted in real time.
And importantly, this doesn’t make someone superior, detached, or immune to difficulty. It simply removes an unnecessary layer of suffering that was never required in the first place.
The Fog Can Return — And That’s Okay
One of the most important things to say is this: coming out of the fog doesn’t mean it never rolls back in.
Thought is persistent. Conditioning is deep. Stress and fatigue can temporarily re-fuse perception and interpretation.
But once this distinction has been felt, it’s rarely forgotten entirely. Even when the fog thickens again, there’s often a quiet recognition underneath: this isn’t the whole picture.
And that recognition matters.
It prevents panic from becoming absolute. It keeps curiosity alive. It allows space for clarity to re-emerge without force.
Nothing Was Ever Wrong With You
Perhaps the most relieving aspect of this shift is what it reveals in hindsight.
Nothing was broken.
Nothing was missing.
Nothing needed to be fixed.
The suffering was real—but it wasn’t proof of failure or dysfunction. It was the natural result of a mind doing what minds do, without being recognized as such.
Coming out of the fog isn’t about becoming better at life.
It’s about seeing that life was already there, even when it felt obscured.
If this resonates, Proof That You’re God explores this distinction—between thought and reality, perception and interpretation—in much greater depth. The book isn’t about eliminating thought or transcending life, but about recognizing what becomes available when thought is no longer mistaken for the ground of experience itself.
