I Don't Know: Tales From a Perpetual Fence Sitter and Crossroads Loiterer

It started small— seemingly insignificant, even. 

What do you want to eat for dinner? What should we do today? Do you want a fruit cup or a bag of chips? 

I don’t know. 

As time went on, the questions persisted. They evolved. 

What's your favorite color? What do you want to be when you grow up? What do you want for your birthday? 

I don’t know.

Then one day, terrifyingly, the questions became real. 

What are you going to school for? Why do you think you’d be a good fit for our company? Where do you see yourself in five years?

 It seemed that the only thing I ever truly knew… was that I didn’t know. 

The irony was not lost on me— but it was hardly a comfort.

There was a time when not knowing didn’t bother me so much. Actually— scratch that. It wasn’t that I didn’t mind, exactly. It was more that no one expected me to know. Choices were small then, and usually made for me by the more decisive adults who governed my young life. If I was faced with a decision, I learned early I could often just wait it out. Eventually, some grown-up would get impatient and toss out a tired phrase like, “Make up your mind or I’ll make it up for you.” 

And while some defiant part of my young personhood bristled at the idea of lost autonomy, another part of me let out a quiet sigh of relief. Leaving the decision up to fate—or chance—or some higher power (read: Mom or Dad), removed the risk of choosing wrong. It wasn’t about blaming someone else; I’ve never been that kind of spiteful. It was about self-preservation. To remove decision is to remove the possibility of regret. 

The success of my personal philosophy was unsustainable; its methodology, inherently flawed. I rolled dice, flipped coins, shook magic 8-balls— I asked everyone and everything except myself. All the while witnessing my peers evolve seamlessly into themselves. Through friendly classroom debates, anecdotal English essays read aloud, and after school clubs joined, I envied how readily answers and decisions flowed off the tongues of other people, this intrinsic self-knowing I seemed to find myself without. I began to believe that there was some crucial component to my psychological makeup that I alone lacked. And by refusing to exercise the muscle of my own self-knowing, I unintentionally nurtured this perverse belief: that other people must know what’s best for me better than I do. That they were more capable, more certain, more right. Because that was the way it seemed to me.

Worst of all, I spent a very long time feeling like a stranger to myself.

It was around my freshman year of college (not a college I chose to go to, mind you) that something really shifted. I discovered that if I made snap decisions without thinking them through, I could save myself from the agony of decision-making entirely. (Again, I’m all about self-preservation.)

I became a real yes person. 

Yes, let’s go to that party. 

Yes, let’s pierce my tongue. 

Yes, let’s sneak out and drive across state lines in the middle of the night—hurry, no time to think about it! If I stop to think, we won’t go!

I changed my major four separate times during my first two semesters. And though my advisor kept assuring me I was just completing my general requirements and didn’t need to declare anything until my junior year, I insisted—No! I must change it now.

Because if I had a whole year to think about it, I would only change my mind again and again. (Which, of course, happened anyway.)

My spastic decision-making kept me afloat through college and spit me out, relatively unscathed, right onto the shoulder of post-grad life—staring up at a big, flashing road sign that read: “The Unknown.” 

I looked around—had I missed an exit? Could I turn back? There was no this or that here—only the unknown, so massive and daunting it seemed to encompass both everything and nothing at all.

 But there was no adult to tell me what to do now— just me. And the decisions felt too important to leave them up to spontaneity alone.

Something had to give. I shifted gears—again—and turned to the list, because I was an adult now, and list-making felt like a very adult thing to do. And oh, did I make lists. Pros and cons lists. To-do lists. Mind maps. Venn diagrams. They were hand-drawn, digitized, color-coded, multimedia. They were everywhere—and they exhausted me.

Unsurprisingly, the paralysis of this excessive list-making was its own form of inaction— the familiar face of procrastination. Funny thing, those old habits. I felt like a child again: small, scared, uncertain. Back to where it all began. And I realized there was only one thing left to do—what I hadn’t done all those years ago. I had to make a decision: part reasonable and logical, like a list; the other part from the heart.

I spent so many years afraid of my wrongness. And the belief that to make a decision was to experience a loss of possibility. But maybe the only wrong decisions are the choices you don’t allow yourself to make— to hold yourself back in the name of self-doubt.

It would be inapt to say I’m cured— because there was never anything wrong with me. But now, when I’m sitting on the fence, I'm seeing a new perspective from up here. And when I linger a little too long at a crossroads, at least I'm looking around and taking it all in.