| A friend of mine has deep wounds around their experience of making the wrong decisions during formative (college years) they they feel has set them back in life. Everyone around them sees their story differently: a successful career pivot into a field that they love which compensates them well. They have truly inspired many! Yet for my friend, the story they tell themselves is that their poor decisions in college will essentially haunt them forever because they don't have the academic pedigree and work experience of their peers. I have my own relationship with rumination, and appreciate this perspective from Michael Pollan in his book "How to Change Your Mind" "A lot of depression is a sort of self-punishment, as even Freud understood. We get trapped in these loops of rumination that are very destructive, and the stories that we tell ourselves: you know, that we’re unworthy of love, that we can’t get through the next hour with a cigarette, whatever it is. And these deep, deep grooves of thought are very hard to get out of. They disconnect us from other people, from nature, from an earlier idea of who we are." My advice for anyone reading this is to listen to the stories that you tell yourself. Ask yourself how you can adjust these stories to have a more empowered understanding of yourself. |
At the time you make a decision it is often impossible to know what its consequences are, so if we had made a different decision things might actually be worse.
Not making a decision in time can also have negative consequences.