Indecision Versus the Wrong Decision
Choosing Your Fig: How Momentum, Imperfection, and Relentless Consistency Reshape Who You Become
Ten bad years can be erased by two focused ones. Momentum erases mistakes faster than regret ever will; the fig tree is a misconception. You can be starving to death, unable to choose, watching as they wrinkle and go black, or you can pick any fig and swallow it whole. More is lost by indecision than the wrong decision. Perfection is the enemy of success!
The trivialities of career choice were abysmal and incessant to my childhood. I never knew what or who I wanted to be when I grew up. Elementary school hall corkboards and classrooms were littered with posters of “Always be yourself,” which I pondered as much then as I do now. Today, however, I am rich in life because I am the girl who does it scared, does it alone, and does it with her full heart.
The trivial choices that comprise the outfits you wear represent you as a person. The trivial choices that comprise the conversation you strike define you as a person. The trivial choices that comprise every action of your day define you as a person. Choosing an outfit plagued hours of my every morning, and choosing the right words in a fleeting conversation plagued my hours long after. How do I want to be perceived? I did not know what I wanted because I did not know who I was. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out before I realized you can pick whatever and become whoever.
Introspectively, if your daily actions were closely analyzed, would they be representative of your larger goals? Inherently, one can assume this means that having a plan is the basis of direction. Once you decide that you want a good life, the universe will start moving things for you to have it. The people you need will appear, the doors you need will open, but not until you decide. Once you truly, sincerely decide. “Did I live today as my dream self would?” Answer only with a yes or no. For every “no,” identify and eliminate what caused it. Keep refining until your days are filled with “yes,” and then flourish. How do you know what you want? Don’t envy those with direction. Why a doctor? How did you pick that college? Life would crumble at any inconvenience to their itemized checklist for their specified goal. I am free.
I can’t remember what seven-year-old me was wishing for, throwing coins in the fountain and blowing on dandelions, but I hope the person I am today was at least one of them. I pick people in my life and reflect on what they would do in the immediate scenario that I find myself in. I have characters to which I attribute my most professional decisions versus my most outgoing versus my most nonchalant. Depending on how I want to appear socially and how I would like to be perceived, I picture a person, their mannerisms, their colloquialisms. Am I every person I have ever met? They keep inventing harder days, but I keep inventing a new me.
I have no prime. I will evolve until I die. Every day I walk towards my dreams, and my daily habits pave the path. The path to what? Surely there must be habits which can serve the general greater good, whatever potential direction my future may take.
My elementary school comprehensive knowledge examination’s results provided a chart showing where our individual scores lay for every subject versus where they should be. Every year we were taught to improve our lowest-scoring subject; to close the gap in order to bring up our personal averages. Only in the fourth grade did a teacher recommend, rather, that we improve our highest scores instead. In theory, this practice meant it took just as much effort and studying to become an outlier; to be above average; truly exceptional.
Realize that in your final form you are nothing more than a rough draft. Your potential is infinite. These are the freedoms that raised me, dually worsening but directing my sense of who I was. Not being defined prematurely gave me this illusion of choice. I only knew I had to be the best. At what? Sixth-grade me went to a robotics camp at a local engineering college. Seventh-grade me was accepted to a state police boot camp cadet program. Eighth-grade me lived on a college campus taking classes for credits for a summer. Ninth-grade me sat in an AP Physics class with seniors. The decisions of my circumstances clarified to me the value of being the youngest in the room, even when it meant being the dumbest. Definition is subjective! I am the space between who I’d like to be and what others made of me.
My report card capped my 109% in AP Physics at a 105% A+. Everything was measured, instead, in leaps and bounds of success. Applying for scholarships, my 4.4 GPA could only be submitted under the “4.0 or greater” category. I qualified and placed at our district’s cross-country race and was awarded a medal the morning of the homecoming dance, which the quarterback of the football team asked me to. I was blind with naivety. I focused on what I lacked. Almost every metric in my life was defined as above average. I grasped at straws: I could be thinner. Everything was always black and white, though; all or nothing. I executed accordingly. I became horribly sick. I lost everything.
No animal on earth knows what a Monday is. No plants. No ocean. No nervous system in nature. The week doesn’t exist. You’ve been exhausted by something that was never real. What is the point? Perfectionism is very addictive because it is very seductive. That is, the concept that criticism can totally be escaped when we are perfect and achieve this “above average” in every aspect of our lives; we will be void of judgment. But, really, the relief is giving in to the destruction! This was the first fig I picked for myself.
Stripped of the numbers that defined me, I hit rock bottom, then clawed deeper. I am Icarus’s feather-covered saplings. I believed scaffolding was the same as structure. I thought I could build it, but instead became obsessive, forgetting everything else for years. However, I am not angry that I starved my brain and spent nights shivering when perhaps I could have instead experienced what being young could’ve been. I could have picked a different fig, a different path of life. All suffering originates from desire; any fig would have delivered. Stoicism is defined by suffering: we are both the marble and the sculptor.
Today we toast to the detours that carried us to better doors. This fig made me free. I ruined everything and gave myself the opportunity to start from scratch. I cut the invisible strings that so painfully bound me: all the numbers and metrics and standards. I read and reread Fight Club, the concept of losing everything. At first, I could not stop wasting time. Every person was just meeting me at a very strange time in my life. I resonated with the last line of the novel until I realized how badly I wanted to live; to escape. At 16 years old, I travelled to the third-world countries of South America, learning culture and what true suffering looks like. I learned what a privilege it is to be challenged by a life that you created on purpose. What a selfish privilege it was to be plagued by my trivialities.
But the meanest thing you can do to yourself is to pretend you don’t want the things you want. The fig exists. Shrink the desire before anyone else can see it, but that fig exists. Call it unrealistic before someone else does, but that fig exists. Walk around with this low-grade starvation you can’t pinpoint because you buried the appetite so deep that even you forgot to put it. The figs are there. Wanting things is dangerous. The figs are plentiful. Want it anyway. The fig exists! The alternative is a life of pretending you’re full.
However, sometimes I worry I’ll never be full. Sometimes I think I’m wasting every second even now writing this.
I was 20 years old when I signed a contract teaching at a private Catholic college. In my second semester, I didn’t have a TA, and my students were older than me. One man frequented my office hours and booked my tutoring appointments, and stayed long after class was dismissed. Though at first with mutual hesitation, the entirety of our lives were soon discussed. His perspectives were refreshing. He entered the military young, married young. All his figs were harmonious, kind of going hand in hand. Did the extremes of my life fascinate him? He saw through me. He told me nothing in my life would ever be enough for me.
A week ago, I picked up a library copy of Fight Club, rereading it for the first time in years. This was the first copy I had read with the author's afterword. He wrote about Bolivia as the last place the book has yet to be published, where the poorest people gather in the Andes villages to celebrate the festival of “Tinku,” where they beat each other up until they’re exhausted. The same Bolivia raised my mom before she came to America and started a family. The book ending now reads, “Being tired isn’t the same as being rich, but most times it’s close enough.”
Overachieving defines me. The things I desire consume me. I strive to excel in every discipline, becoming the most well-rounded. Today I’m in graduate school. I work teaching every morning and then at an office job every afternoon into the night. Nine hours of credits a week, 15 hours training, 20 hours teaching, 40 hours at the office. To love to struggle is to refuse to be a spectator in your own life! This summer I did an Ironman triathlon, a 50K ultramarathon, and countless half marathons. All my decisions have led me here. There was no path to find again; I am forging it. For months I slept when I was not tired. Now I am so tired I cry at every thought I have. What a privilege it is to outgrow the things that you used to settle for. Every decision that I’ve made has allowed me to experience the most of life; to feel the utmost of every human emotion. I’ve felt pride, joy, sorrow, depression, terror, rage, passion; I’ve been ecstatic, overwhelmed, and mortified, tranquil, and blessed. I’ve felt freedom knowing I can feel sadness when it is there, but never forget to recognize the happiness that I’m blessed with constantly. I do not know what I want to do with the rest of my life. Incompleteness is all we have! My experiences are paving the way for opportunity; I am paving the way. Luck is when opportunity meets preparation. I have not been lucky, but fortunate and well prepared. Opportunity meets you where you are.
Adjacent to my office building is a high school track. I walked it for the first time after having paid a tremendous entry fee for my very first triathlon, stressed about the amount of equipment and training I needed to overcome. What usually took people years, I was going to do in the next three months. I was starting from scratch: no bike, cleats, tire pump, bike bottles, run bottles, run belt, running shoes, wetsuit, swim cap, goggles, bike trainer, treadmill, gym membership, pool membership, nor any idea about nutrition or strategy. The man from my class told me it would be harder for me not to do the race. He knew me. It would keep me up at night, unable to sleep, my thoughts longing, and my every waking moment pursuing what I desire with purpose and fury and aspiration. A presence which must be demanded. That day at the track, I met an Ironman World Champion and Olympic cyclist, now Congressman. Divine fate. His Michael Phelps swimming pool took a minute off my 100-yard time, and the cleats he bought me added 8 mph to my cycling. When you are ruthlessly consistent, the world bends to your will. Opportunities arise, obstacles shrink, and doors you never even knew existed start to open. Life doesn’t get easier; rather, you get sharper and more capable. It’s in the struggle and the days when you want to quit but don’t. That consistency forges greatness. Consistency doesn’t just build success; it redefines who you are. It turns potential into mastery, and dreams into reality. Consistency wins.
I am not everything I want to be, but I am a lot of things that I wanted to be five years ago, and what a beautiful thing it is to realize that. I set the tone for my reality. I used to think the gift I would be most thankful for is clarity. But I’ve never been less clear about where I want to be and who I want to be surrounded by. How many people am I? Whose performance am I watching? What is this space between myself and myself? Clarity comes from motion. Do not approach the endless game of life with a finite mindset. To define is to limit! The objective is not to be done nor to be complete, but to settle into a daily lifestyle you can sustain and that allows you to make daily progress on the areas that matter. Face mask on, sandalwood and jasmine in the diffuser, 528 Hz playing, peppermint tea brewing, .pdf on fashion metaphysics open, just be. Embrace that life is continual and look for ways to enjoy the daily practice.
Remember the time you felt lost? No, sorry, that was not meant to be a question: remember the time you didn’t know who you were. Remember. You can start again, like the sun does every morning. You are not defined. You will not be defined by the fig you pick, but by the courage it takes to embrace that unknown.
