A Place You Decided To Be

Stop for a second and look around you. Work, home, on holiday, on the metro — wherever you are right now, you're there because of a decision. At work, because however tired you were, you decided to get up and go in. At home, because you chose the work-from-home day, or the holiday, or you decided to start something from your own living room. Wherever you're reading this, it's a place you decided to be.

We're strangely bad at admitting that, even in the language we use. "It was an opportunity I couldn't turn down." "It was too good to say no to." Somewhere along the way, deciding — actually taking control of a choice — got quietly downgraded into something that happens to us, rather than something we do.

I've made plenty of decisions people didn't expect. I gave up work after my first child, and everyone assumed I'd go back after maternity leave, because I was supposedly a "career girl." I married a boyfriend I met when I was nineteen. We sold up and moved to France with two young kids and a car full of belongings, no jobs lined up, no solid plan. I didn't buy bitcoin when it was ten dollars — that's a decision too, and I own that one exactly as much as the others.

We've made choices, jointly and separately, that the world around us didn't understand. But we're in a good place now, and that's not despite those decisions — it's because we made them, sat with the ones that turned out badly, and worked around the consequences rather than wishing them away. You can't undo a decision once it's made. But you can learn from every single one of them, good or bad — as long as you're willing to actually own it as yours.

That last part is the one people skip. It's easy to own a decision that worked out. It's much harder to say "that one was mine too" about the one that didn't — and yet that's the only version of ownership that actually teaches you anything. The decisions we quietly disown, reframe as luck or bad luck, circumstance or opportunity — those are the ones we never actually learn from, because we've already filed them under something that wasn't really us.

I don't think that's a small habit. I think it might be one of the most limiting ones we have. Every "I couldn't say no" is a small refusal to look directly at a choice you actually made — and every time we do that, we lose the one thing that choice could have taught us.