Twotwo

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

I was clutching my phone, crouched in a corner of my tiny studio, willing it to send a message I had neither the guts nor the complete resolve to do. Finally, my best friend reached out and sent the message. “You’re welcome,” she said, tossing back to me my phone, as I stared in bewilderment about what just transpired.

See, that was how I was as a 21 year old.

I’ve always known what I wanted. In fact, it’s always easy to know what you want. In theory. Does it make me happy? Does it yield great results? Does it consider other people’s feelings? Is it a good investment in the future?

In real life, however, things aren’t as easy (or, at least, they don’t come off as such). The number of questions you ask yourself increase the more choices you’re presented. It’s no longer “Does it make me happy?” as it is “Will this make me happier than what I have now? Than Alternative B? C? D?” (Not, of course, that there were necessarily alternatives I laid out for me.)

This goes on until you realise you’ve become too scared to make decisions. You think, maybe I can stall until the last possible moment, if the choice is gone when I have to choose, maybe it shouldn’t have been a good choice to begin with. You think, the choice that remains is the choice I will choose.

And sometimes, the choice that remains is the choice to not choose.

You do this, all the time. You sit and lay out choices in front of you, eliminating each one that leaves. An application closing, a deadline passing by, you sit and you decide, or you hope you do. You look at the choices, always too scared to pick. Always asking, with your hand a hair’s breadth away from choosing, “What if a better choice comes along?”

So you never choose. So you retract your hand and ball it into a fist, perpetually perched on top of your knee. So you justify it to yourself by saying, “It’s okay, if it were a choice that I should have taken, it would have stayed until I had to decide.” So you end up doing the same old things, always thinking, the best choice will come along, I only need patience for it. So you miss out on things that wake your senses, that make your heart skip beats. So you never experience excitement, because you’re too busy staying safe. So you never undergo heartbreak, because the choices you choose are the choices that give you comfort.

So you never experience life, because you don’t choose to live it.

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

I was mentally debating with myself — do I stay or do I go, do I fight or do I not, do I choose to smile or be sad or be quiet or be somber or be drunk or be sober or be still?

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

And admittedly, the indecisiveness did little in making me happy.

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

Or maybe I was just a coward, too scared to take the plunge, too unsure about myself. Too apprehensive of what’s to come.

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

And I say I was.

Because this year, I’ll try to be a little braver.

I was indecisive up until the last minutes of my 21st year.

But I swear to you (whoever you are), at the end of the year, I would have tried (and chosen) to be happier.

Happy birthday to me.