...Chose my Own Adventure

I've been thinking a lot about change lately. And, also, Choose Your Own Adventure books.

With the change thing, I didn't make it a personal growth homework assignment or anything, it's just that there's been a fair bit of it going on. Good friends of mine who've I known for ten years are getting a divorce. I was best man at my ex-boyfriend's wedding. My grandma had a hip replacement. My best friend of twenty years has gone to live in Amsterdam. My boyfriend changed jobs and I did the same - leaving my workplace of six years behind in the process. The changes in themselves haven't worried me so much though, as I've never been afraid of change. Between 2005 to 2010 I ended up having to move house six times in five years. It really didn't disturb me as much as it should of. I kind of treated it like a mildly unpleasant chore - like going to get a bikini wax. So change, not a problem with it. You get the cards that you're dealt and you play them. Change and I are cool with each other - homeboys, bros, amigos. But choice? Now the act of choice, on the other hand, has always terrified me. Bring that free-radical of freewill into the equation and suddenly I'm the cowardly lion peeping out from behind Dorothy's farm-fresh gingham skirt.

The act of making a decision, choosing a road at the fork in the yellow wood, ruling out one option in favour of another, closing a door to climb through the window, getting the fish instead of the chicken... it's all terrifying. Because what if you're wrong? You choose the left path instead of the right and suddenly you're in the Bog of Eternal Stench instead of at the Goblin City, partying with David Bowie in his purple spandex tights. And who's to blame? You and you alone, because you made that choice. I don't have a problem with what the Furies dictate should be my lot, mere mortal at the feet of Zeus I am, but if you choose it yourself and it turns out you made the wrong decision? Well it's easier to curse the capricious Gods for your misery rather than feel the weight of failure from running the ship aground yourself. Because you had to choose, you know the moment it all went wrong and exactly when you had the power to make it different (but you didn't). I think if I had been Alice in Wonderland sitting at the bottom of that rabbit hole looking at "drink me" and "eat me", I'd still have been sitting there 150 pages later making children across the ages yawn while I tried to decide what order to do things in: if I should eat and not drink, if I should try to climb back out, if I should call for help until someone came, if I should have a small bit of each or a large bit of one, or whether I should eat or drink anything at all. I have simply never liked being asked to make the call.

And this is where Choose Your Own Adventure comes into it. When I was little, when I read Choose Your Own Adventure books I'd leave the tip of my finger behind at the pages of critical decision-making (a sly finger left behind was my preferred method, as noting the page number down would simply have been cheating). I did this so that I could quickly go back if it turned out I'd made a bad decision and just pretend it never happened. Seriously. The whole thing used to give me little seven-year-old anxiety attacks so the only way I could avoid that was the insurance-policy finger. For example, if I'd followed "To go up to the surface, turn to page 6" and gotten to page 6 only to find out "Pirates are waiting in your boat and shoot you dead and steal all your gold", I could then quickly turn back to where I'd left my finger and decide to "stay underwater to explore the shipwreck further instead". Pirates never happened. Call off the watery grave. No need for child prozac.

So keep this behavior in mind, in the context of me choosing "To leave your employer of six years for a new role at another cosmetics company, turn to page 58". I turned to page 58 and then found myself sitting at my desk of said new job two months after this decision, feeling like the Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade who chose the wrong grail to drink from. i.e. he started choking on it, withered away into a gross old skeleton, then turned into a big pile of dust. If my adult life had been a Choose Your Own Adventure book, at that point I would have turned back to where I'd left my finger and made a different choice. But it wasn't so I couldn't. And I was just left sitting there with the creepy old Templar Knight's voice echoing in my head "She chose... poorly".

But what I came to realise was, the thing is that I hadn't chosen "poorly" just because it didn't turn out how I had expected. I had chosen my own adventure and now I was living it. You can't hedge your bets in life and you certainly can't stay for ever at the bottom of the rabbit hole trying to make up your mind. I had the option to let the furies decide my fate and stay exactly where the Wheel of Fortune had spun me or I could make another one of those terrifying things - a choice - to leave. So I quit my new job. I took my finger out of the page and turned to a new one.

Will let you know if there's pirates in the boat when I get there.