A Reckoning: What Do I Want?

I feel like I’m at an intersection with a bunch of crossroads and exactly no idea what road looks even a little bit better than any of the other ones. Normally I find people in situations like this really unbearable. Can someone truly have no opinion about where they want their life to take them? Is it really that hard to make a decision and trust that it can get cleaned up if it doesn’t go as planned? But now I’m that exact person, and it’s not a great time.

It’s interesting to consider my indecision, but perhaps more interesting to consider where that indecision comes from (does it sound like I’ve been in therapy a long time?). I think I’m needlessly worried that I’ll be seen as some kind of failure if I make a choice I have to back out of later. Who wants to eat crow? There’s some worry about how people might perceive me if I make a big life change they weren’t expecting. I also feel like this might be the first time that I need to make some decisions where there’s less immediate safety net to catch me and mitigate some of the damage. I still have incredible people in my life that are supportive, but all of the last big life changes I’ve made felt like they didn’t have the implications that some of these ones do. And these ones also feel like they need to be determined by me, not necessarily in consultation with anyone else, which has also been hard. Adding isolation to the uncertainty isn’t a great time.

There’s one more level to this that I’ve been fighting for a while now. I’m also frustrated that my life doesn’t feel like it used to—full of bright moments of clarity and heavenly assurance—but am reluctant to get too far away from all of the things that were bringing those to my life. I miss who I was and what I felt. Can I get back to that? Is it worth hanging on in hopes that stuff returns?

That’s part of what hurts the most: I’m still trying to stick around and have some faith. And I don’t doubt that God is around, but I wish so much that I could just get a little sign from Him about where I should orient my life, and I don’t feel like I’ve gotten much of anything in that regard. Even if he wanted to tell me to hold still, don’t make a big change, calm the heck down, I would! I’d welcome the communication, even if it were something tough to do. He’s told me to do tough things, but at least I felt like I could manage because I understood that it was a divine directive.

I think the bottom line on a lot of this is like… welcome to adulthood? Welcome to forging meaning on your own instead of through a rigid system imposed on you by others? Sometimes the things you hold dear will fail you (or perhaps become less impactful over time)? And sorting any of it out just takes time and effort, and I’m prone to wanting to get somewhere now and with the least amount of work involved. It sometimes feels like a miracle that I’ve accomplished anything with an attitude like that.

Things are just super weird and uncertain right now, and I desperately wish that weren’t the case. But what they don’t tell you when you’re little is that this is probably just sort of how life goes until you die; there’s always something else to make a decision about. I hope I manage to get a little better at it at some point.