Neil Gaiman

therealkatiewest:

I am very good at making the wrong choice. If I have to choose a line, I will pick the one that doesn’t move while I watch the others stream past me. If I have to choose something off a menu, I will pick the thing that is rather awful and has surprise olives in it (I hate olives). If there are two boxes and one is full of a million dollars and the other is full of dog shit, I’d probably pick the dog shit. Making the wrong choice is just something I’ve grown accustomed to, but it’s had a very unfortunate consequence.

Often times, for fear of making the wrong choice, I choose to make no choice at all. I think it’s true that the amount of choices available to me currently are a bit daunting—I can literally do, be, have, want anything. The amount of choices is what I thought was paralyzing me into inaction, but just recently I’ve thought, well, maybe it’s not that there’s too many choices, maybe it’s that I feel there’s too many wrong choices.

I tried to choose the best TESOL course and ended up just not doing it. After taking an eternity to make a choice about what is the best way to get in shape, I looked at a dozen yoga studios in my area only to decide that I couldn’t decide and never went to a single class. I am trying to choose which continuing education art class I want to take this semester and am thinking that maybe I should do something more productive? Make a better choice? I have been trying to choose what to do my Masters in for AN ENTIRE DECADE. I could’ve finished a PhD by now.

I feel paralyzed by the fear of possibly making the wrong choice, so I have determined the best course of action is to forego making the choice altogether and just coast. This is the wrong choice. You want to know something that is really stupid? Most of the time, I can’t decide what I like; I always tell myself, well, if I knew what I really liked, I would now what to do, have some direction, be able to make the right choices. And so you would think that the solution to this problem is to try things and determine if I like them or not, right? Except I have this stupid idea that if I focus too much on any one thing, I will fill my brain up and not have room for other things. Oh my god, I can’t even explain it without sounding like a complete idiot. But I think, if I get really in to, say, textiles, what if it doesn’t work out, and I’ve filled up my brain with how to create organic dyes and the history of the broadloom and I have all this information in my brain I can’t use? How the fuck did I come up with this theory? It makes no sense. Especially because I could just look at my brother, who has been a bartender, a construction worker, a law clerk, and a real estate agent, and see how he’s putting it all together in new ways all the time. I am a teacher and I am often wary of really committing to education because I don’t want to become an expert in something I don’t intend to do for very much longer. I always thought, well, if I spend my weekends reading about educational pedagogy and listening to podcasts about technology in the classroom, then when will I think about my photography? (Ha! What photography? I guess I meant when will I watch Vampire Diaries.)

But I’m doing myself a disservice. Shit, I’ve been doing myself a disservice for so long now. I read Neil Gaiman’s New Year’s thing for this year and the part that resonated most with me was when he wrote, “Try to make your time matter: minutes and hours and days and weeks can blow away like dead leaves, with nothing to show but time you spent not quite ever doing things, or time you spent waiting to begin.” And I was like, Fuck you, Neil, stop judging me! And then I was like, Neil, you’re right. What did I have to show for my fear of filling my brain with the wrong information? What had I accomplished waiting to make the right choice?

Not nearly enough.

[I have started oversharing once again over on Patreon if you are interested in seeing daily pictures and reading daily blahhhhging.]

Ah, that’s good, Katie. And honestly, I’m not judging anyone.

My New Year Wishes are always every bit as much for me as they are for the world: they are what I want for me, and I like to hope that that might apply to everyone else as well. And I’m trying not to judge myself.