What I Learned From Blogs

Sometimes you make the right decision, but that doesn’t mean that it will feel good. There are right decisions that feel terrible, but that doesn’t mean they were the wrong decisions. And that is one of the hardest things to remember when you’re slogging through your feelings.

There are decisions that you make because life gives you two choices, but you don’t want either one. You would almost rather make no decision than choose between your two choices. But one day you realize that you must — for your own sanity, you must — so you look at your two options, and you choose the one you can live with. You wish there had been a third option, the option you really wanted. But it’s not there, and you can’t force it to be there.

Living out a choice is sometimes easy, especially after a lot of time has passed. You can go days barely remembering your decision, and then weeks or months or years not remembering it at all unless someone calls your attention to it. And then life-changing decisions have a way of dragging you back to the pivotal moment, making you look back and wonder if you made the right choice. But you know you made the right choice. It was not the wanted choice, but it was the right choice. And you tuck the choice into the back of your mind again and remember that right decisions don’t always feel good.

They don’t feel right, even when you know they’re right.

And then one day, your decision is finalized. You reach a no-going back point, maybe not realizing the no-going back point would arrive on that day. But one day you wake up and you realize it’s there. The no-going back point tears open every Band-Aid you slapped over the decision wound, and for days you walk around wondering how no one else notices that you have this gaping hole where your hope once lived.

And then there is the day after the no-going back point.

And the one after that.

Sometimes you read about someone else’s story, something completely unrelated to your own — to what you are grappling with or trying to make sense of. But somehow it fits. It teaches you. It shows you a way forward. It helps you make sense of limits.

Stories can make the world make sense.