The hardest decisions aren't between pain and peace.
They're between two kinds of pain. Stay, and it costs you.
Leave, and it costs you. Speak, and it'll hurt.
Stay silent, and it'll also hurt.
Like staying in a relationship where you're loved
but not emotionally met. Or leaving, knowing you'll
miss the way they made your coffee or held your hand
in the grocery store and made you belly laugh until
you cried.
What makes these decissions so tough is that we've
been thaught to believe that the right choice is the one
that feels good, and that clarity of making the right choice
will come with a sense of calm and peace.
But a lot of the time there's no frictionless path.
There's just choosing the pain. You're more willing to hold
that feels most honest.
It's choosing the version of discomfort that lets yourself
live with yourself afterward.
And we don't really talk about this. I certainly don't feel
prepped for a lot of hard decisions I've had to make,
especially not in this curated, convenience driven
virtual world where, you know we expect everything to be
optimized and clean and obvious, but real life is just
murkier than that and emotionally maturing is less
about finding the right decision and more about building
the capacity to sit in tension long enough to make one.
So what I've come to understand is the question really
becomes, can you build a nerveous system strong enough
to stay with what hurts without abandoning what matters,
so that when life throws you really, really hard decisions,
you're equipped not to go in survival mode and collapse
or freak out, but actually keep your head on your shoulders
and navigate whatever the tension presented will be.

Baya Voce