Were you ever too afraid to make a decision? I don't mean the big things that SHOULD take some serious thinking, like "Is this the guy I should marry?" or "Is this really want I want to do in life?" I mean things like, "Where do you want to go for dinner?" or, "Did you like that movie?"
My youth group leader from middle and high school, and now one of my best friends, always told the girls in the group not to be like that. "If you're going on a date, and he asks you what movie you want to see, the worst things you can say are 'I don't know' and 'I don't care.'" So why has it always been so hard for me to make decisions?
I'm sure it goes back to always wanting to please people. But I hate that it's gone so deep to my core that I'm actually unsure a lot of the time. It's not that I just don't want to tell you if I liked the movie, it's that I'm really not sure.
It's not that I'm not opinionated. I have some very strong feelings about a lot of things. I guess there are just a lot of things out there that I don't feel well-educated about, so I'm not ready to form an opinion.
That sounds nice, doesn't it? Politics, for example. There's so much I don't know so that's an easy answer to my beliefs. But you can't apply that to the book I just finished reading. Did I like it?
I had a really hard time in classes coming up with things to say or ask. It was much easier to just listen to what my classmates thought. How did I learn to shut that part of my brain off? I read the texts, I just didn't form any theories about them. Seriously, how do you learn to stop wondering?
I've done a lot better the past few years. I learned to love and trust myself, which has helped a lot, but my last few years of college I couldn't open the vault of my thoughts... assuming there was one.
I do a lot better in day-to-day conversations now. It really helped getting out of my element and being forced to do challenging things. I studied in Ecuador for six months and learned I could and handle a lot more than I had thought I could. Even though some of the things I did had nothing to do with academics--hiking for four days--it still reminded me that if I could do that, imagine what else I could do.
It's hard not to slip back and let other people tell me what to think, though.