Sick with Indecision

In the darkness of the late morning, I feel the emptiness of not knowing. I am no routine. I am a question mark without a plan. I tell myself that I should write, and I think where? The decisions are a barrier to my doing. I must set out a plan for myself or I will never succeed. Is this what perfectionism feels like? Being incapable of doing something small, simply because one is concerned to do it right? My future-minded self jumps immediately, so what if I want to use that journal later in a piece of writing. I think perhaps I need to have the freedom to write well only for the purpose of writing it down, rather than for the purpose of something else.

Every day is a new day. I work for myself and this chaos has been my life for the past 5 or so years. At times I have been very regimented, and also at times, I have had obligations to get up early and be online at the same time as others. But in the middle of the day, I have always struggled to concentrate, moving from place to place, shop to shop, and finding most of my day squandered on simply trying to focus rather than in the actual act of focusing (implementing a non-moving pact).

Now I am in the weirdest space of all. I am ignoring my business for the most part and I am telling myself that I am “writing.” Well, I am writing. But what am I writing? The indecision I carry in life spreads itself on all things. I am working with the most effort on this incredibly powerful trait because it has an unusual way of preventing everything that I want, while at the same time bringing the comfort I crave when I don’t know what the right thing to do is.

Rich Roll in a podcast with Tim Ferris the other day explained simply, “We never know what to do, and that is the way life is. To think that we can control the future is to misunderstand. All we never know is the next step in front of us.”

But let’s go back to the indecision about the smallest of things. Where am I writing this journal? Over the years, my indecision caused me to have anxiety attacks at the smallest thing. I remember distinct moments where the choice between skim and whole milk could leave me crying milkless, out in the street. To this day, I am not entirely sure what the cause was, but I think I could pin it on the idea that lots of small catastrophes were happening to me as I traveled. I was living on the road, and it was my grand idea to maximize everything (my fatal flaw) and in so, I made many mistakes leaving places after only one week and moving on the next week. It was so much to plan and so much that I couldn’t leave undone. I was also holding down a job and that stress and catastrophe made it much more work. Most of the time I would surely mess it all up, cost myself extra money (a real concern), and/or end up in a disgusting place to stay or worse, nowhere to stay (which did happen).

I can only pin it to that, and also to Madagascar…the fatal trip. Everything sort of culminated on this trip. I was in charge of producing a climbing film and every day there were a thousand tiny decisions that somehow meant that the production would be good or bad later. There was no going back, we had no more money, specifically, I had no more money. The sponsor money was long gone and it was purely just my personal hard-earned cash, at less than 12K a year at the time, that was a hefty price. The pressure was so great, the worth so high, that I collapsed under it all. When I arrived at my parent’s house, with no home in sight to come back to, I could no longer even look at the photos or footage, I had some strange form of PTSD. And what happened? In my version of the story, I failed.

After that, it was almost like my mind was incredibly tired. I’m talking years tired. My mind was ready to quit, full-time. It was insistent that there was no energy left for any decisions for the next 2-3 years and I would just have to sit in my room and do the same things every day until that time had passed. I didn’t realize that something so seemingly small could feel so debilitating. From what time to get up, to where am I going today, to do I want to exercise or not, these small decisions felt so great, so huge, they were akin to getting married or not.

I felt exhausted. I felt confused. My head would spin and I would need to lie down, or the tears would come, but I was not able to explain to myself or to others what I needed at that moment. Mostly I would go back to bed and stare off into space, pretending that no one would ever need me to make a decision again.

I was lost and I discovered decision fatigue. A real thing. I was ecstatic to discover that there was a name for this and that I wasn’t crazy or my brain was broken. It said it was a side effect of PTSD and also of constant overwhelm, and nervous system shock. But what surprised me about it all was that nobody seemed to have any solutions. This lasted for many years. I am not exaggerating. Some days I would simply depend on others, if I started to go into the “tunnel,” I called it, of unknowing, I would often just let someone else take the lead and tell myself that everything would be okay, but even that was hard for me. I felt so out of control. I was the only one who could control it, so how was I going to get it back?

I had sought therapy about 4 months in and my therapist has little to offer. They were astute with questions but not so much with suggestions, as most therapy sessions go, and I felt lost. How was I ever to fix myself?

In the age of information, whenever something goes wrong, we have so much advice, so many books, articles, and podcasts that you would think all our problems were constantly solved. I was needing something to be solved so I absorbed as much as I possibly could, but I started to notice something. All these self-help books quoted the same studies, and quoted the same quotes…I started to think that there was one self-help dude in a mansion in San Francisco secretly controlling the world with only his thoughts.

In the end, my mother was the main help. “I used to be that way, and one day I wasn’t”.”
Thanks, mom.

But the simplicity of that conclusion was actually a big help. I realized that I didn’t have to remain this way and that the best way was to practice.

I am standing in Office Depot, I need a pen. There are three choices, black, red, and blue. Which one do I need? Well, I need red so I can see it better on paper. Black is classic and it writes nicely. Blue is good too, more exciting than black. I don’t know which to pick. I can feel my head starting to spin and I draw a deep breath. I reach swiftly, and my hand lands on blue, I grab it and my entire body is screaming. WAIT WHAT IF WHAT IF WHAT IF WHAT IF…

But I force myself with all of my mind to not listen to my mind and I walk as fast as possible to the cash register and swipe my car. They hand me a bag with the pen and I feel sick. My body is going to convulse, I can feel it. I race to my car and get in and drive away as fast as possible. Put a song on!  My head screams. I need to get out of this feeling. When I get home I rip off the packaging, now I can’t bring it back and I hide the pen from myself, so I don’t have to see it. I lay down on the bed. I can breathe a bit better. I did it.

There is no magical story of how I improved this trait, and I still don’t fully understand why it became so extreme that I couldn’t get a new job, find a stable living situation, buy a car, or even decide what to wear. It was so debilitating, I was certain that I would never fix. But when I bought that pen, I felt some sort of strange power. Maybe I could get better.

Maybe if I bought enough pens in a row, all different horrible colors, I would be able to see which color pen I actually wanted. My solution before all this was to never buy pens. If I accepted something as a gift, I didn’t have this repulsion to it. My life was filled with free pens and marketing materials from the local real estate agent or tech company. My closet is full of hand-me-downs. My life is just a copy of someone else’s. I had no idea how to be someone other than someone else.

Three years later, my pen buying has certainly improved. And now it takes me no less than 10 minutes to decide and I force myself through the thoughts saying over and over again, it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. I like to convince myself that I can always return it. But that has turned into a receipt-finding nightmare of never-ending tasks. I buy and return. Buy and return. Buy and return. To the point where spending 3 extra dollars on an adapter for my laptop sends me into a stress panic. Then I realize I procrastinated so long that I probably can’t return it anyway, and suddenly I am happy with the adapter.

This sort of strange disease really had no name other than sick in the head. It’s hard to live in a world where you can’t even trust yourself. How do you ever know how to do things or how to improve or worse, how to be happy?

A week ago, I bought an airline flight in less than 2 hours. That was a literal record for me, remembering back around the time of the milk-crying-stage it once took me a literal work week to buy a plane ticket. Not to mention, I also had to work. It was a very busy week. I have graduated to understanding that every decision has no answer. I understand that I will feel sick and horrible every time I make a commitment, except for the rare times when I feel some sort of wonderful wash of confidence move over me and I live for those moments. I understand that it will still take more time to fix, and as the decisions get bigger, the waves of wonderful confidence do too, and I just have to keep going.

In a conversation with a friend, they put it simply, “I feel excited, but I feel afraid.” Maybe the problem was that I simply couldn’t tell the difference anymore. And every time we commit to something, it means we are voluntarily missing out on something else. With the age of social media ever present, perhaps it’s not just the perfectionism but the FOMO that made me ill too.

One day, I imagine I will be that person that powerfully says “No, I do not want cheese on my hamburger,” and smiles incredibly wide that they are absolutely certain that they want their meat sans fromage. Maybe I will be a director making hard calls for hours every day for weeks and weeks, tireless, confident, and unwilling to acknowledge that they could be wrong. Is there a wrong decision? I think that is something that I have decided there is not. I do not believe myself. But I try to believe myself more every day. All I can do, is try more, believe more and ignore my thoughts more, every..single…day.