Decision Making

Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right.

– Ellen Langer
Psychologist and professor

This little quote showed up in my instagram a while back and I haven’t stopped thinking about it. Decisions can be tough. I can spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons, doing research, and that’s all good and well. But the longer I sit with this Ellen Langer earwig in the back of my mind, the more I feel it’s really true.

Since I was a teenager, I had made the decision to be a mom. I met someone in my late 20’s that I wanted to build a life with. We moved in together, got married, and waited for the right moment to commence procreation. By the time we were ready, I was 36. We tried. Oh how we tried! But I was just not getting pregnant. I went to a fertility doctor and endured many rounds of hormone injections to prep me for the egg retrieval portion of IVF. I had very few eggs left in my body.

After a majorly emotional and disappointing year of trying to get a stockpile of fertilized eggs, we made the decision to stop the process. We had one viable blastocyst. We put it in my uterus. I was pregnant… and then I wasn’t.

That was one of the most difficult life moments I’ve ever endured, right up there with the death of a loved one. It was the death of a loved one I’d never met. The death of the life I always wanted. The death of what I thought my life’s purpose was. I was heartbroken.

For a while this tragic event drew me and my husband closer. We considered adoption, but “not right now”. We wanted to let the emotional dust settle first. And like most of life’s tragic moments, we reassessed what was important to us. And that’s when we grew apart. I wanted to focus on joy and connection, my husband got focused on his legacy. If it wasn’t going to be a child, it would be his work. We grew further and further apart until we had no overlap in things to share with one another. We divorced.

Out here as a single childless woman now in her 40’s, I dove into improv, clown, and sketch comedy. I found a community of wonderfully creative people to share with. I revelled in the exhilaration of performing for an audience. I made friends with people who were ambitious in creative pursuits and this lights me up like nothing else. I found joy and connection.

Working a full-time job while pursuing all these hobbies fills my schedule so full, I occasionally need to cancel things to recover from all the excitement. All the time I think to myself, if I had kids, there’s NO WAY I could do all this. And that Ellen Langer quote popped into my feed.

I’ve moved through decisions big and small with that thought about making the decision right. Life is going to take you all kinds of directions, some expected and some not. I’m realizing that the decision itself doesn’t really matter. Had I become a mom, my life would be completely different. I wouldn’t have all this fun in performance and creation. But I would have something else. I know for a fact, that I would have poured all my creativity into motherhood. Raising a human being would be my art and purpose. And my joy.

Now, at 45, through lots of tiny steps, I’ve found what I was wanting all along. I get to create things that didn’t exist before, I get to collaborate with excellent people, I get to learn from excellent people, and I get to create environments for others to cultivate confidence, joy, and purpose. I am so lucky. And all I did was make the best of what I have to work with, over and over again. The decision to not be a mom was made for me, but I made it right.

The path you can choose is not the decision itself – you could practically make the choice at random. The real choice is what you do with what’s in front of you. How you engage, how you talk to yourself. It’s a choice of where you put the majority of your focus. Will you choose to wallow forever in everything that didn’t go your way, or will you choose to notice all the things you can learn from any failure, and notice all the things that are good?