INDECISION NEARLY DESTROYED me in my twenties. I could not make a decision to save my life—would rather dwell in a state of constant contemplation until the very last moment—and when the decision was in motion, I was still riddled with doubt.
I’d show up at the doors of potential lovers thinking the gesture romantic, a total refusal to read the signs. “He’s really hard to get a hold of,” I wrote in one journal entry I wrote right after college, about a trip to see a guy I liked who’d enrolled in a publishing course in Boston. The guy was so busy and completely uninterested in me but I still needed to show up at his doorstep to truly receive the message.
Indecision haunted me everywhere—choosing meals on menus, arrival and departure times, the precise shoes to pack for a trip, where to go on said trip. On the one hand, I recognize this as a problem of the privileged, to have choices in the first place, and let them stress us out. On the other, I learned over time that even if the choices were few, my brain probably still would have played these games with me.
Some of it has to do with the way I grew up, the way I understood scarcity and the weight of each choice as a result, but I also just think it’s how I’m wired. It’s one of the biggest challenges I worked through in therapy. “You only have to be sixty percent certain of anything to make a decision,” one therapist named Nancy told me. She wasn’t the greatest therapist—she often answered the phone for her whiny children mid-session—but I carried around this nugget of wisdom and it helped dislodge some of the doubt.
We don’t have to know where we’re going to get somewhere else. We make sense with our senses, after all. We learn by doing. In some places, they talk about decisions as something you “take,” not “make,” which I find interesting, as the decision gets objectified as something you hold and carry instead of construct. I’ve also come to believe that decisions will happen whether we’re making them or taking them—and that old adage is useful—even a non-decision is a decision.
Though preference is also a factor—we all have them—and that is love, to recognize them in ourselves and in one another.
Even ants have a preference when given the choice between CheezeIt crackers and Goldfish—the only reason why I know this is because I saw a TikTok where a guy placed a pile of each kind of cracker near an anthill and watched the ants work harder for the more savory cracker. It wasn’t really a choice—they all just knew what they wanted and went for it.
Fate would have me live in another country for ten years and then move back just in time to take care of my parents when they needed me most. Fate would take my daddy in September and my mama in March under the most glorious of skies, eight years apart. My daddy said goodbye to my mama over the phone, left her the longest message in the world whispering to her all the sweetest things he’d probably said a million times but never with such reverence, urgency or clarity.
Fate would also have me learn a language for half of my life with long stretches without it. Language is like water—not land. You can try to “conquer” it or you can try to swim in it and either way you’ll learn that language has rules but no borders, language has waves but not hard edges or fences that can’t be torn down for the sake of an “I love you.”
Sometimes we know just enough to make it to the next decision and that is enough. In past lives, I didn’t bother much with god or prayers but I find myself talking to the invisible through the poem as a prayer and this has helped immensely when it comes to wobbly friendships and relating in general with people in such states of despair. “It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules,” writes Jacqueline Harpman, in the horror story “I Who Have Never Known Men.”
A coherent self walks the bridge between inner and outer worlds, acts and behaves in the world in ways that match our feelings and beliefs. Most of us are splitting in two half the time when we talk and explain ourselves, and I hope fate will have me finally align and recline into a peace that sustains me. Skin heals when it seals. Most people who say they’re not the praying type have probably still prayed—they just never called it that.
When plunged into the absurdity, as Harpman writes, we get to surprise ourselves with inventions predicated on our survival, and learn to proceed through the impossible, to “take possession of the void.”
I’d show up at the doors of potential lovers thinking the gesture romantic, a total refusal to read the signs. “He’s really hard to get a hold of,” I wrote in one journal entry I wrote right after college, about a trip to see a guy I liked who’d enrolled in a publishing course in Boston. The guy was so busy and completely uninterested in me but I still needed to show up at his doorstep to truly receive the message.
Indecision haunted me everywhere—choosing meals on menus, arrival and departure times, the precise shoes to pack for a trip, where to go on said trip. On the one hand, I recognize this as a problem of the privileged, to have choices in the first place, and let them stress us out. On the other, I learned over time that even if the choices were few, my brain probably still would have played these games with me.
Some of it has to do with the way I grew up, the way I understood scarcity and the weight of each choice as a result, but I also just think it’s how I’m wired. It’s one of the biggest challenges I worked through in therapy. “You only have to be sixty percent certain of anything to make a decision,” one therapist named Nancy told me. She wasn’t the greatest therapist—she often answered the phone for her whiny children mid-session—but I carried around this nugget of wisdom and it helped dislodge some of the doubt.
We don’t have to know where we’re going to get somewhere else. We make sense with our senses, after all. We learn by doing. In some places, they talk about decisions as something you “take,” not “make,” which I find interesting, as the decision gets objectified as something you hold and carry instead of construct. I’ve also come to believe that decisions will happen whether we’re making them or taking them—and that old adage is useful—even a non-decision is a decision.
Though preference is also a factor—we all have them—and that is love, to recognize them in ourselves and in one another.
Even ants have a preference when given the choice between CheezeIt crackers and Goldfish—the only reason why I know this is because I saw a TikTok where a guy placed a pile of each kind of cracker near an anthill and watched the ants work harder for the more savory cracker. It wasn’t really a choice—they all just knew what they wanted and went for it.
Fate would have me live in another country for ten years and then move back just in time to take care of my parents when they needed me most. Fate would take my daddy in September and my mama in March under the most glorious of skies, eight years apart. My daddy said goodbye to my mama over the phone, left her the longest message in the world whispering to her all the sweetest things he’d probably said a million times but never with such reverence, urgency or clarity.
Fate would also have me learn a language for half of my life with long stretches without it. Language is like water—not land. You can try to “conquer” it or you can try to swim in it and either way you’ll learn that language has rules but no borders, language has waves but not hard edges or fences that can’t be torn down for the sake of an “I love you.”
Sometimes we know just enough to make it to the next decision and that is enough. In past lives, I didn’t bother much with god or prayers but I find myself talking to the invisible through the poem as a prayer and this has helped immensely when it comes to wobbly friendships and relating in general with people in such states of despair. “It is impossible to predict what might happen in a world where you don’t know the rules,” writes Jacqueline Harpman, in the horror story “I Who Have Never Known Men.”
A coherent self walks the bridge between inner and outer worlds, acts and behaves in the world in ways that match our feelings and beliefs. Most of us are splitting in two half the time when we talk and explain ourselves, and I hope fate will have me finally align and recline into a peace that sustains me. Skin heals when it seals. Most people who say they’re not the praying type have probably still prayed—they just never called it that.
When plunged into the absurdity, as Harpman writes, we get to surprise ourselves with inventions predicated on our survival, and learn to proceed through the impossible, to “take possession of the void.”
