“You’re going to make up your mind right?”
I ask my emotions, fear and anxiety.
What I get is a reply from codependency, “you know, Alice, don’t make decisions too fast, you can’t do that! You can’t act on your own.”
I close my eyes and realize that I have many choices. I can let fear destabilize me, leaving me to hide from the light. I can listen to that part of my mind that wants me to second guess myself. Ask so many people what to do that my decision becomes confused, and the water I’m walking in becomes shallow.
Why should I listen to fear or anxiety?
Why should I let others play such a role in my decision making that I end up with something I’ve never asked for?
Doubt and reliance are not negative in themselves, they both have purposes. I have been in situations where asking others for help has changed my life. Yet, there is something to be said, when it becomes a continuous pattern. The cycle I have fallen into is one that has become immobilizing.
I live in a world of decisions, decisions, decisions. When I cannot make a decision without experiencing crippling fear, it becomes impossible to live contentedly. For years I thought I knew what I wanted, to finish school in a timely matter like everyone else, and to live some exciting life, just like I thought all adults did. Where did these desires come from, when I knew to some extent that pushing myself would just cause pain and ruin?
The answer is that I could not make a decision. Who was I relying on to make these decisions for me? It wasn’t overt but slowly the opinions and desires of society around me filtered into my sense of how life should be. I had grown up in a world where people all walked the same path. Where people who took a side road were just not going to have a full and productive life. This made me bitter and jealous. Why was it me who had to have my parents die? To have to begin living as an adult at age eighteen? My friends were laughing in their dorms, drinking from those red cups, and studying their passions.
I believed myself broken, that I would never get the pieces together. I tried school, and failed. I would never be a person. Something was extremely wrong, and it would never be right.
The first big decision that I ever truly made independently was to go into the hospital on November, 8th 2016. Somehow, manic and delusional, I knew that I needed to be somewhere safe. I knew that I couldn’t live on my own, not right then. That decision has led to others, to move away from New York and begin to build a life where I live now. To pursue options other than college to make a living, at least for a while. I’ve started driving again, something that I never thought I would be able to do. When I am out on the road, I feel free again. I’m like a caged bird that just recently learned how to fly. I’ve learned that calm and quiet do not mean that tragedies are approaching, and that feeling productive can be just motivation and not a symptom.
I make little decisions every day, like what I post on this blog, or when I should get out of bed.
I hope that I will continue to make many more.
Of course, anxiety, fear, and codependency still appear. Sometimes I listen to them for a while, and sometimes I fall prey to their suggestions. I will never fully trust myself, and I will never be perfect, but at least now I have learned that there is nothing wrong with listening to myself a little.