What is “thinking in gray”? I chose it as my Instagram username over three years ago, but I’m still unraveling what it means to me. 

Now, gray is certainly my favorite color, and I do tend to do a lot of thinking. But although that interpretation does cover all the bases, it’s also highly superficial and doesn’t say much about me specifically. It’s hard to think of a more generic “fun personal fact” than favorite color, and thinking is, rather famously, something that every human being does. (Homo sapiens literally means “thinking man” or “wise man”).

The brain is also full of gray matter, critical for regulating emotions, making decisions, and self-control. If this is what “thinking in gray” is all about, then maybe it’s my way of identifying with those processes and how I’ve struggled with them over the years. This, I think, is closer to the truth. The fulfillment I’ve found in recent months as I’ve started to find my voice on mental health issues scratches that same deep itch I was feeling when I came up with the phrase years ago.

Yet there’s still more meaning to uncover in those three simple words. Gray can be a visible color or a description of physical cells, but it can also represent a concept. The “gray areas” in our lives are those where the things we think we know for sure come into conflict with each other. This is where we find moral dilemmas, hard decisions, and lose-lose situations: where black and white mix and we lose the clarity that comes with one or the other.

It’s difficult to live in a world full of gray areas, to be sure. But this hard truth brings out what I think is the most important meaning of all from the phrase “thinking in gray”. It means that we don’t have to say “this phrase is about favorite colors/neuroscience, and that’s it”. Instead, we can entertain all the interpretations from the superficial to the profound and let them meet, mix, contradict, and alter each other. In fact, this is how our brains themselves work on the deepest level – the gray matter firing on the lowest level coalesces into symbols, thoughts, and consciousness that has the power to reach back down and affect itself.

So does thinking in gray just mean juggling meanings, getting stuck in mental feedback loops, doubting every decision, making mistakes, and not knowing things for sure? I think it does. But that’s just part of the human condition – every single one of us is going to do those things, like it or not. Our choice is whether to accept and grow into that insecurity or ignore it and let it destroy us before we even realize it was there.

One of my favorite musical artists, Jon Bellion, explains this much better than I can (and in fewer words, to boot):

“I guess if I knew tomorrow, I guess I wouldn’t need faith

I guess if I never fell, I guess I wouldn’t need grace

I guess if I knew His plans, I guess He wouldn’t be God

So maybe I don’t know, but maybe that’s okay”

I’ll be thinking in gray, and I hope you will too.