Is there anyone else out there who finds it impossible to make a decision? It seems to me that I spend half my life paralysed by
indecision and the more choices available the worse my dithering becomes.
I am in a dilemma at the moment as I am being driven to distraction by neighbours whose lifestyles aren’t very compatible with my own. The feeling that I should move has been building up for a while and today I finally took the first step, I actually viewed another house. In my mind, I was expecting the decision to be made the second I walked through the door; I’d either love it or hate it. But this is real life and how often does that happen?
To say it’s a fixer upper is something of an understatement but it definitely has potential. All that now remains is for me to make a decision and, wouldn’t you know it, my paralysis has kicked in. It’s not a new affliction, I have been cursed with it my entire life. Something as simple as a trip to a sweet shop would inevitably end up with me staring forlornly at rows of confectionary, until my mother lost all patience and made the selection for me.
Maybe that’s what it’s all about, I’m waiting for someone to step in and make the decision for me but who on earth is going to do
that? I’m a grown woman and whatever decision I make has to be my own. I keep listing the pros and cons to anybody unfortunate enough to engage me in conversation and we go around and around but it always ends the same way. The decision is mine and mine alone.
I recently read a list of twenty signs that you are an adult, the usual nonsense - able to cook a meal from scratch, have a mortgage, know how to change a plug and so on and so forth. What it should have said on that list was be capable of making a decision because that’s the hardest part, in my opinion, of being all grown up. There’s nobody to make decisions for you, you have to stand or fall by whatever you decide for yourself.
Throughout my life, I can point to a whole series of regrets but none of them are about wrong decisions rather they are about the
decisions that I failed to make. All of my regrets come from standing still when I should have made a move. The regret of experiences unknown is always far sharper, I’m sure, than the regret of making a mistake.
I regret not studying filmmaking at university, even though I was given an unconditional offer, because I was too intimidated by the other candidates. Instead, I took a safer, more conventional route, which may or may not have been for the best. I regret not going out with a boy called Richard, who I met at a Specials concert in 1980. My friend said he had sticking out teeth and so I rebuffed him but met him again several years later, as the boyfriend of a dear friend, and he was funny, kind and pretty much perfect. I regret sticking with a profession I wasn’t really suited to for over twenty years because I was too scared to think of an alternative.
If I decide to buy this house and it turns out to be a dud, it will probably be the first time in my life that I have made a bad decision. It seems to me, it’s time for a change, time to start regretting the things that I have done rather than the things I didn’t do.
indecision and the more choices available the worse my dithering becomes.
I am in a dilemma at the moment as I am being driven to distraction by neighbours whose lifestyles aren’t very compatible with my own. The feeling that I should move has been building up for a while and today I finally took the first step, I actually viewed another house. In my mind, I was expecting the decision to be made the second I walked through the door; I’d either love it or hate it. But this is real life and how often does that happen?
To say it’s a fixer upper is something of an understatement but it definitely has potential. All that now remains is for me to make a decision and, wouldn’t you know it, my paralysis has kicked in. It’s not a new affliction, I have been cursed with it my entire life. Something as simple as a trip to a sweet shop would inevitably end up with me staring forlornly at rows of confectionary, until my mother lost all patience and made the selection for me.
Maybe that’s what it’s all about, I’m waiting for someone to step in and make the decision for me but who on earth is going to do
that? I’m a grown woman and whatever decision I make has to be my own. I keep listing the pros and cons to anybody unfortunate enough to engage me in conversation and we go around and around but it always ends the same way. The decision is mine and mine alone.
I recently read a list of twenty signs that you are an adult, the usual nonsense - able to cook a meal from scratch, have a mortgage, know how to change a plug and so on and so forth. What it should have said on that list was be capable of making a decision because that’s the hardest part, in my opinion, of being all grown up. There’s nobody to make decisions for you, you have to stand or fall by whatever you decide for yourself.
Throughout my life, I can point to a whole series of regrets but none of them are about wrong decisions rather they are about the
decisions that I failed to make. All of my regrets come from standing still when I should have made a move. The regret of experiences unknown is always far sharper, I’m sure, than the regret of making a mistake.
I regret not studying filmmaking at university, even though I was given an unconditional offer, because I was too intimidated by the other candidates. Instead, I took a safer, more conventional route, which may or may not have been for the best. I regret not going out with a boy called Richard, who I met at a Specials concert in 1980. My friend said he had sticking out teeth and so I rebuffed him but met him again several years later, as the boyfriend of a dear friend, and he was funny, kind and pretty much perfect. I regret sticking with a profession I wasn’t really suited to for over twenty years because I was too scared to think of an alternative.
If I decide to buy this house and it turns out to be a dud, it will probably be the first time in my life that I have made a bad decision. It seems to me, it’s time for a change, time to start regretting the things that I have done rather than the things I didn’t do.
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