Choice

“I looked up, suddenly feeling smaller and very alone. There was no one near me. No hand was touching mine. No one stood close by. … [T]he only one I had to help me was myself.”

-- from Storm Front by Jim Butcher

Sometimes, I hate being a grown-up.

There are some advantages, of course, to being an adult rather than a child. You get to stay up later. You have beverage choices that expand beyond fruit juice and milk. You don’t have to take as many tests or ask permission to go to a friend’s house. Generally speaking, you get to run your own life. That’s the good thing about being an adult.

But here’s the bad thing about being an adult: You have to run your own life. And sometimes, I just can’t take the pressure.

This week, I was faced with a grown-up decision at work. Deep down, I knew that it was a good situation to be in. It was a choice between two new positions, both of which would be a step up from the one I am currently in. Both seemed to have similar potential for producing interesting work and valuable learning opportunities. Both offers represented someone in the organization having strong beliefs in my potential – which is something I had felt was slipping away in the last month or so.

To sum up the situation, I’ll say that there really wasn’t a wrong choice. Thus, this didn’t even really qualify as a problem. It was a non-problem.

Still, I hated to choose, because each choice would have its set of repercussions. Taking advantage of either opportunity would mean giving up the other. It was a matter of choosing which opportunity I would rather let go. I found this agonizing. As I usually do, I stalled as long as I could in making a choice, as if I hoped that some clear “right” choice would appear or I’d find a way out of making the choice at all.

Honestly, Katie, I thought to myself. What do you really want to happen? Would you rather someone came along and made the choice for you? Told you what you had to do? (Actually, if it were the right person, I don’t think I would mind that. I tried to hire my friend Carla to make all my grown-up decisions for me. She said no.)

After I had run out of stalling techniques, I did finally make a choice. Although I found a way to get a little bit of both choices in the final arrangement, I did turn something down. I found the whole process utterly exhausting.

I’ve done a lot of thinking this weekend about why I hate these situations so much. Situations like this one should not be such difficult choices. No one’s life hangs in the balance. There isn’t even much potential for regret. So why do grown-up choices scare me so much?

After all my pondering, I’ve realized that the thing I don’t like about big choices is how utterly alone they make me feel. Someone asks me a question, and it feels like the whole world goes away as soon as I recognize that I’m the only person who can answer it. It’s just me, making a decision that will affect my life. It will be just me living with the consequences later. I’ll have no one to point to and no one to lean on if this goes badly. The buck stops here. And that thought makes me want to pull the covers up over my head and hide.

I hated choosing a concentration at the arts and sciences center I attended during middle and high school. I hated choosing the colleges to which I would apply. (I didn't mind choosing which college to attend, as a full ride to one and almost nothing from the others made it a non-choice.) I hated choosing a major. I hated choosing between the two jobs I was offered when I graduated. I hated choosing my first apartment in Chicago. And I hated choosing which opportunity I wanted to pursue at work this year.

Now, as I am looking at this issue objectively from the outside, it seems like a pretty ridiculous way to go through life. I’ve been struggling to find a way to change my perspective about making choices. In my musing, I remembered the end of my senior year in high school. It was a time full of these choices, all of which made me crazy because they felt like they would determine the course of the rest of my natural life. I was struggling with this exact same issue as I wrote my graduation speech. Outwardly, I was trying to act like a self-assured senior, excited about going to college. Inwardly, I was thinking, I know this is the way things have to go, but I wish things could just stay the way they are. I was afraid to move on, because whatever path I chose would be mine to deal with.

During my senior year, I was in the school play. At the end of the show, my character faced a choice between staying somewhere where she was protected and cared for, and going out into the world on her own. She knew she had to leave her haven, but was still reluctant to do it. Seeing her struggle, another character looked her in the eye and said, “The door is open for you, Mrs. Savage. Make your peace with loneliness.”

I put the line into my graduation speech. I talked about how scary it was to walk through that door, but how it was important to have the courage to do it. When I was 18, my focus was on the door.

Now, ten years later, I’m coming back to that same line, but a different piece speaks to me this time: Make your peace with loneliness. That part of the line means more to me now than it did then.

The fact of the matter is that being an adult can be a lonely business. I am not really as all-alone as I make myself feel sometimes. There are plenty of people in my life that would be more than happy to talk my choices through with me. But in the end, I am in control of my own life, and I do have to handle the consequences of the choices I make.

But the privilege of making my own choices is a freedom that I would sorely miss, if it were gone. Keeping that in mind, perhaps, is my way of making peace with the loneliness that comes with being an adult.