You’re not the only one stuck
It's not always a "you" problem
You’re the Only One, Right?
There’s a particular kind of loneliness in feeling like you are the only one who can’t just move forward.
Everyone else seems fine.
They’re shipping code, answering questions in standup, not visibly stuck.
But you’re stuck.
What exactly does “done” mean here?
How deep am I supposed to go?
What actually counts as success?
This is where a specific kind of self-judgment lives. A quiet judgment that just… shapes everything.
It turns nobody told me what’s expected here into everyone else figured it out and I didn’t.
It turns this is unclear into I am incompetent.
And so you stay quiet. You stay stuck.
And the thing that’s actually bothering you — the missing clarity, the undefined task, the expectations nobody spelled out — keeps affecting not only you, but oftentimes the whole team.
Instead of bringing your full thinking, your pattern recognition, your keen ability to notice what’s vague — you focus on compensating.
On blending in.
On not being the difficult one.
On not looking stupid.
The ambiguity stays in the room.
And your potential impact is muted.
It Must Be Me
In a recent conversation I had with a newer engineer, this is exactly what was happening.
He had been assigned code reviews. No one had explained what a successful review looked like at his level. No one had told him how much time to spend, what the actual output should be, or what the point was for someone who couldn’t even push to main. He had five sitting in his queue. He wasn’t doing them.
He felt ashamed about it.
The kind that makes you hesitate before speaking in standup.
The kind that makes you assume your manager already sees the gap.
The kind that quietly predicts this is the ceiling of your capability.
And because the discomfort felt personal, he treated it as something to regulate internally rather than something to examine externally.
We worked on drafting a message to his manager. Not a confession of his mental state. Just clear, curious questions. What does a good review look like at my level? How much time am I supposed to spend on one? Should this take priority over my own tickets?
Not Just You
While we were working on it, he found out a senior colleague was experiencing the exact same confusion.
Not a junior. A senior engineer. Same team. Same reviews. Same fog.
That detail matters more than it might seem.
He had spent days treating his discomfort as evidence of a personal limitation. His need for clarity felt like a burden — something to manage internally, not surface externally. He assumed the ambiguity was bothering him because he’s broken, not because the expectations were actually unclear for everyone.
But the senior engineer wasn’t confused because of ADHD. He was confused because nobody had defined this process clearly.
The ambiguity was real. It was just that one person felt it first, felt it most acutely, and interpreted that as a personal failing rather than useful signal.
This is a pattern I’ve seen many times. Some people tolerate vagueness longer. Some feel it immediately. Neither response makes the ambiguity disappear.
The Impact You Don’t Have
When confusion gets internalized as defect, two things happen.
You lose energy managing yourself — trying to be less needy, less sensitive, less bothered.
And then, the team loses the signal you were about to surface.
The cost isn’t just the anxiety you carry.
It’s the clarity no one receives.
And it’s the impact you don’t get to have.
Because instead of being the engineer who sharpens expectations, who tightens processes, who names what others are skimming past — you become the engineer quietly compensating for something that was never actually yours to compensate for.
Your sensitivity to ambiguity isn’t what limits you.
Internalizing it does.