Torn - which path to take?

Option A. Option B. Option C. Three choices. Three paths. Three futures. And only one me.

At some point in life everybody has to make decsisions. small ones - like choosing which shirt to buy which can be a very important choice! - and Big Ones, like which people we trust. Our daily lifes are full of countless decisions, most don´t have a really big impact on our lifes but at some point there will come a time when we have to make a Huge Decision, when we have to choose a path.
But which path? There are So many different paths to take.

                                They´re not straight.      They twist.      They part.      They stop in a dead-end.

We don´t know where they will lead us so how can we choose one? How do I know which one is the right path? Who´s advice should I listen too? Which people should I follow? Someone once told me to follow my heart and trust my instinct, that they´ll take me where I need to go. But what if my heart wants several things?
Well, think, choose and suck it up, no? That´s easier said than done.

Think. I haven´t been thinking about anything else for the past 31 hours. When I ate, when I read, when I watched TV, when I went swimming, while brushing my teeth, while driving around, while sleeping – all the time I haven´t thought about anything else but the choice I have to take. Three very different paths I could follow. Three different ways to live for the next few years. Three different voices – that existed, exist and want to exist – telling me different things.

Which one do I want? Honestly? All of them.

Which path does my heart tell me to follow? All of them.

Which one does my instinct tell me to follow? All of them.

Unfortunately I know that you can´t have everything you want in life. Life sucks. But that´s nothing new.
So now what?
Who tells me what to do when I can´t?

What happens if you, your heart and your instinct all don´t know which path to take?

First of all ask the people you love the most what their choice would be, right? So first of all: family.

The result is this:
my mother telling me to go.
my sister telling me to stay.
my father telling me to take the in-between.
my brother telling me to do whatever I want and be grateful I have a choice  (which by the way I am immensely, if I would just knew what to do!).

Well, thanks a lot for the help! Who should I trust more?

My mother wants me to go because she would want to go.
My sister wants me to stay because I already went away when she didn´t.
My father wants me to take the in-between because if it doesn´t go right and it doesn´t go left then take the middle.
And my brother, well he didn´t really say anything.
-> So that didn´t work.

What now? Friends. Next problem: which ones?

Those who are at home want me to stay home.
Those who are away want me to come back.
Those who I just recently met again say I should take the middle way. Wow, how helpful. Again: Who should I trust most?

My friends who knew the old me?
My friends who know the new me?
My friends who know parts of old and new me but neither fully?

Just great. So while trying to choose the path I want to follow I have to choose again who´s advice I will trust because I can´t seem to choose!

I hate choosing. It scares me. What if I choose something I don´t want? It´s one thing if I choose the wrong shampoo but an entire different thing if I choose the wrong future.
If I screw this up I could screw my whole future and then I´ll die unhappy, alone and depressed! Okay, maybe I´m exaggerating a little bit, but that´s what it feels like for me. And I don´t want to die unhappy, alone and depressed! I had enough of that, thank you very much.

33 hours sitting and thinking. And that´s just the time I kept track off. Actually I´ve been thinking about this as soon as I realized that the year will be over much sooner than I thought it would be and I realized that I didn´t change much in the way I hoped I would but much more the way I feared. I didn´t want to leave. Not yet.

But they took my hope of thinking I could choose to stay.

After months I finally scrapped all my courage together and was as ready as I would be to depart and go back to my hell – aka home sweet home – just to have all my resolve to be crushed by the tiny bit of hope they gave back to me.
Then in the next moment they took it back again. Thanks again for this unnecessary action.

I tried to continue as I would have done. But my defences had been breached and I had to realize that I had only been lying to myself.
I tried my best to suck it up and then persuaded myself that I could still do it and I actually got excited to try.

So here I was accepting my fate, ignoring the facts that I was right when I realized I was lying to myself, and then they give me back my sweet, painful hope. Again. It doesn´t have to be this way. This time I´m actually allowed to hope. I could be happy again. How cruel must they be?!

And now I have to choose the path I want to take. Which by the way is quite late to choose and sets me under time pressure. Whoopee. Because it´s always smart to rush those decisions. Especially when it concerns me.
Because I always choose and do the right thing. That was sarcasm by the way.

Back to the beginning: how do we choose the right path?
The thing is: is there a right path? I don´t think there is a “right” path.
There are paths that seem difficult, even impossible, to follow but how can we be sure that it won’t get better after the next turn? Unfortunately we also can´t be sure that it won´t get worse.
But what is sure in life? Nothing. Except maybe that everybody will have to die eventually, hopefully not unhappy, alone and depressed.

So I think that I´ll have to rephrase the sentence: How do we choose the path that will lead as the closest to our goal we set in life?

If I would decided to do what my mother wants me to do I´d have to take option B.
If I want the future my sister thinks I should have, option A.
For my father´s future vision I´d have to take option C. But I don´t like  their futures.

They are all safe futures.

But they are futures they want, I don´t.

So why am I even worrying so much about their futures for me? Well, I value their opinion. All of them had their share of life and should give me advice that´ll help me.

In theory.

But I´m not my mother nor my father nor my sister.

They don´t see that. Nobody does. Everybody always thinks that what they think is good and smart to do is the same for other people. Well it´s not. Nobody - especially my family- realizes that.

Except my brother. And it´s his advice I think I´ll listen too.
He said to be thankful for the choices I have and choose my own future.
He told me to ignore the rest of my family.
To follow my goal.

At least I know what my goal in life is: happiness and no regrets.

I´ve been thinking for quite a while now.

And I believe I found my path.
I´ll take all three.
I know what you´ll be thinking now: is she stupid? Nobody can be at three places at the same time!

[Well maybe except Hermione with her time-travel-necklace (which I find extremely handy, it would safe so much time being able to travel in the past and stop myself from doing all these incredibly smart things ~sarcasm again~ which I tend to do quite a lot...).]

Anyway, I´m not Hermione so I can´t do that. And I don´t need that.

I´ll try option C

if not then B

and then A.

I´m not choosing yet. I´ll keep them all open as long as I can.
If option C (which actually is option 1 now..) works I´ll know it´s the path I need to follow, if it doesn´t than it´s not and the option that works will be the path.

I have trust that it´ll work out the way I need it to, it always has even if I didn´t knew it at that time.

It is important to listen to your heart, instinct and intuition.

Hearing the opinion of others can be helpful (or not, thanks a lot Julie).

But in the end always do what you want, it´ll be the right think. That´s what I learned so far in my life (and not to eat everything my siblings give me, and that I learned the hard way). And it worked out so far. Kind of. And I hope it will work that way for a bit longer.

Making decisions is hard. Stay true to yourself and also have a bit of faith (in God, fate, luck, coincidence, a guardian or whatever you believe in).

Well anyway that´s just my opinion.     



If anybody actually reads this and is even slightly curious what actually happened:

Option 1 -> didn´t work out

Option 2 -> got rejected by Them again (are you SeriouS?!)

Option 3 -> well that´s what started all these problems in the first place!

So in the end we actually got an Option 4! (Why does that not surprise me with my family?)
And I chose that - more or less.

I´m not sure at all.

I´m afraid.

I´m sad.

I´m excited.

I´m heart-broken.

And worst of all: I´m hopefull.

Can´t be sure yet how it´ll turn out. Hopefully there won´t be a new text about how much one decision - made under time-pressure, in an completly crazy (and not the good & funny kind) family and from one even more emotional wreck - can ruin your life.
And there goes hope again. What a cruel little thing.

I pray for you to have a better judgement.