If I had Instagram, maybe I wouldn’t need to write this. But the fact of the moment is that I do. I’ve been feeling an urge lately to get my story straight, in hopes that I can–get ready for it–learn! No doubt, you heard it here first: me, giving myself the benefit of the doubt. You should try it, too.

I’m in a rather liminal state right now, having just returned home after leaving graduate school with three semesters left, having steadily attended for past two and a half years, or 5 consecutive semesters starting in 2022. As soon as I stepped foot on the Denver campus, my first instinct was to book the first flight to my second-choice school in the comparatively lush setting of rural Georgia. The Colorado sun was overbearing, the campus barren, the discussions intellectually void. But before I knew it, my survival instinct took over, as I busied myself with the daily challenges of living in a new city and adapting to a grad program. It’s funny how that daily noise accumulates into a barely detectable distraction from possibly harder challenges and questions that one knows, deep down, they need to face. Eventually.

I never claimed to know exactly what I wanted, apart from the constant short-term craving for an identity in the form of something bigger to attach to. Sometime early in the journey, I made the highly emotion-driven decision to transfer to a different university in the same city, as part of an attempt to maintain a stalling romantic relationship. So I spent two semesters at the new school, made new friends, then found myself anguishing over whether to return to my original university. There, I had the advisor that dreams were made of, I could go back to the campus job that gave me some sense of stability, and I’d be subject to a late afternoon course block instead of starting at 7 at night. As I look back, it’s hard for me to fathom such trivial considerations keeping me up at night. But I’m inclined to accept that they did, that I had to go through the mental self-torture at the time, and it doesn’t define me now.

Heck, even as I sit here today, having fully moved back to Washington state without much of a hitch, I still manage to chide myself for leaving behind some cooking ingredients that I realized would have better use here, between my mom and me, than in my ex-boyfriend’s apartment. I know, though, that at the time I left said items, I was stressed and had different ideas about what was more useful/important. It can’t be fair to chide my past self for a slight change of heart that I didn’t anticipate or even have the energy to think about.

This is what I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: my relationship with human error, especially my own. My parents have always told me to think further ahead before acting, to avoid so much regret. But it’s just hard to be a human and have to constantly attend to the future, sometimes more than the present. I want to become smarter, but doing so means reconciling my emotional blind spots, which we don’t talk about in my family. In the case of the cooking supplies, I wanted to show consideration for my ex-boyfriend given his anticipation of increased food taxes with the new administration. Leaving behind a few items was my way of making life a little more convenient, but maybe that’s assuming his needs rather than knowing them, and maybe that’s why I feel uneasy about the whole thing.

I’m also aware that emotions don’t only mislead; sometimes they’re the singular most powerful force in enacting a decision. But we have to be sensitive to the context around the emotion. Can you think of an instance in which the time between an emotion and its ensuing action was considerably short? One such time for me was when I found out about the acceptance rate of the counseling program I had transferred to. What I felt upon hearing the information, via word of mouth nonetheless, was a sense of pompous outrage not of the angry kind that’s glamorous to talk about. It was the self-important, morally righteous, posturing sort of outrage concerned with social status in its fear of associating with lower ranks. Between sensing the threat of a lowered social status and deciding to direct all my energies at returning to my original institution, barely 36 hours passed. In reality, the difference between institutions was negligible and only a matter of perception. Instead of acting on my outrage, I could have examined the underlying factors more, perhaps finding normalization of those emotions, but it’s hard to accept the ambiguity that comes with normalization, isn’t it? To face the unexceptional, pedestrian nature of your experience and settle for inaction rather than go out of your way to stoke drama and action for the sake of drama and action?

What I’ve learned from this experience of relating emotion to decision is to, when in doubt, take the path of humility. This means noticing when feelings of resentment and self-righteousness come up and not acting from a place of disavowing those feelings. Because the more we try to bury, deny, shame those surface-level feelings, the less we’re able to see the useful stuff underneath them, the stuff that usually leads to authenticity, like admitting fallibility and taking responsibility for moving forward rather than festering in self-blame. In that example, fears of negative self-perception dictated my actions; in brief, my pride took over. It’s not that pride can never be useful, but, if anything, this instance taught me to exercise caution amid strong waves of pride. The lesson? Always take the high road, the response that feels harder in the short-term, the one that does the least to rid yourself of the unpleasant emotion of pride or whatever. I could imagine that most of the time, this means no response. It means save your energies for elsewhere.

As I start over this new year, with little going for me in the important adult domains of relationship and career, I resolve to return to the relinquishing of pride, the willingness for humility, the relaxation of the ego, that brought me to this change in circumstances. I had the makings of a respectable career and a promising romantic partnership, which evolved on totally different timelines but something made the desire for a different life overpower that life. Can I say I’m happier now that I’m not living to fulfill those fates? That the future is more open and uncertain? I don’t know for sure. I don’t know if I left school for “the right reason” and not one embedded in fear and shame. But as the ordained number one advocate for myself, I’m obliged to proceed on the highest road on the map I laid out with the latest major decision I made. Every day means working to accept the difficult, unflattering consequences of a decision and making the most of the freedoms it’s allowed me, even if I discover I was wrongheaded in that decision.

The concept of “self-sabotage” seems to be having its moment on the internet these days, with the popular depiction of someone giving into self-defeating beliefs that throw them off their upward trajectory to success, positive change, and whatnot, the typical example being an alcoholic breaking a streak of sobriety. But I find myself increasingly skeptical of the notion of self-sabotage as commonly understood. How could it possibly jive with the belief that humans are innately geared toward toward growth and fulfillment? This is the underlying principle of humanistic psychotherapy and one that’s lodged its way into my own value system. From that premise, I find it more helpful to believe that people get what they want, even if they don’t know what that is, in that the issue not in the sabotage-y action and consequence, but rather in the haphazardness of the aim. After all, who knows, at all times, what’s truly best for them? It’s not supposed to be easy.

But labeling undesirable consequences as self-sabotage lifts responsibility and empowerment from the individual. Surely there’s a difference between leaving a relationship to get disapproving parents off your back and leaving a relationship because you lack the desire to nurture it. This is also where motivation comes in–for addicts, the difference between a state of ambivalence and rock bottom in engendering change. Learning from experiences requires some effort to examine your aim with the consequences, side by side, and see where the discrepancies lie. The bigger the chasm between the two, the more suffering. It takes skill to develop clear-minded awareness of what you’re signing up for and what you’re giving up. Now, I don’t want the knowledge of this to further paralyze me from making decisions. I want to be empowered to speak truthfully about what I want, because the consequences of self-deception are inescapable. So, it’s true. You do need to have to want something badly enough. This I’m trying to make sense of, trying to reconcile that just because ambition levels vary, doesn’t mean my wants are lukewarm and any less legitimate than others’.

tl;dr: Making decisions motivated by fear of negative social perception bit me in the butt. Discovering what actually makes me happy requires uncomfortable realizations, a painful peeling back of distracting everyday noise and chatter.