I resent the road I always chose
Two paths diverged in a wood, and I took the road more sensible
This essay has been a sentence in the back of my mind for two years: Life is just making decisions that make sense until, one day, you die. This week, I finally figured out why that makes me so mad.
As you might remember, I’m taking Stanford’s EMT sequence, which is two ten-week classes for a total duration of twenty weeks. And the instruction is terrible. It’s some of the most disorganized, horrendous teaching I have ever been a victim of. So a few days ago, I thought, okay, I’m going to quit.
There is no need for me to do these poorly conceived homework assignments. There is no need for me to run headfirst into a brick wall each Tuesday and Thursday night as the teaching team fails to teach me what I need to know. There is no need for me to be worried about my GPA anymore. I’m going to get my PhD, for crying out loud, and start a career in politics or something; I don’t need this EMT certification, and I can absolutely flunk this course.
Okay, I’m going to quit.
Except.
Except I want to know more about emergency medicine. I love learning emergency medicine. It would be so cool to get certified in case I ever want to work as an EMT. Even though it’s unlikely. What if I want to have the certification just in case? It’s a ticket, just in case. And right here, I get to snag that ticket for free. Anywhere else, it’s $2000+ and maybe five whole months of night classes, just to get what I can earn right now in thirteen short weeks.
Okay.
I’m not going to quit, I decided, because it makes more sense to just run into the brick wall here, where it’s free and convenient and I’m already 1/3 of the way done.
This is the exact moment when the simmering rage somewhere behind my ribs turned into a rolling boil. I am so angry that I am going to keep being in this class. And this class is going to keep making me angry. But I made the choice that made sense.
So why am I still angry?
Life is just making decisions that make sense until, one day, you die.
It’s not my fault, officer, the inherent logic of the circumstances made me do it
My whole life, I have always had options. Good options, even. Very lucky, privileged ones. But at every major fork in the road to adulthood, I chose something I ended up resenting. Quitting music after high school. Working in a psychology lab in college. Writing an undergraduate thesis. Going to graduate school.
I currently, in this very moment, resent all of these choices.
And I hear you: Natalie, shut up! Let it go already. You were always going to turn into something. It may as well be a doctor of communication who lost her vocal range and turned stubbornly cynical about the existence of true innovation or even empathy in academia. There are worse things to be, Natalie! “There’s kids starving in Africa!” Etc., etc.
And more than that, how is it even possible that I can hold such a deep, visceral anger for my own life and the experiences I have had when I actively pursued them? And when they were sensible decisions? Well, apparently, sometimes choices can be too sensible; so sensible that I didn’t feel like I had a choice at all.
From the beginning, my logic about graduate school was, “if they choose me, then I will go.” And even before the graduate school acceptance decision, I chose to apply. I chose to do an honors thesis. I chose work in a lab. All things I strongly disliked, by the way! None of those things brought me joy! Admittedly, I got a little satisfaction from feeling half an expert after defending my thesis, but none of the rest of it was worth jack shit to me! So why did I do it?
Why did I choose it?
All these choices were forks in the road. Opportunities. And I always chose the road more sensible. And I am filled with so much anger. Anger that I didn’t get a real choice. Anger that maybe I did, and I let my inhibited self decide. Anger that my life is a culmination of cold calculations.
It’s like every time I made a cold, sensible decision, I denied some truer, purer part of myself.
For example, I actively made the decision not to major in musical theater in high school even though I loved it. I loved it. Oh my god, I loved acting, singing, performing. I still do. Oh my god, it’s the shadow stapled to my feet. It’s natural. It’s the easiest, most vulnerable thing in the world that I can do. It’s an extension of myself. I’m even pretty good at it. Other people sing when they’re happy, I sing to make myself happy, do you see the difference, and it always works. It always works. But I was seventeen and said, that’s not a sensible choice.
I quit music and it doesn’t feel like I had a say in that, even though it was literally my say. The inherent logic of the situation—it’s not a solid career move, what if everyone else is hired before me, what if I can’t make any money doing that—decided for me.
So we’ve finally reached the part of the essay where I tug on three threads I’ve woven into the above text: anger, agency, and self-actualization. In all of this thinking about the choices I resent, I realized that I have subconsciously built, within and for myself, a narrative of victimization that fuels my rage. But not only does that anger not win me any prizes, it keeps me from fully appreciating my personal growth I achieved through dealing with things that made me mad.
Anger, Agency, and Self-Actualization
I know that I am a better, smarter, kinder, more confident person than I was when I started graduate school, and yet I refuse to be proud of going to graduate school. This is because I resent my choice to go to graduate school. I am holding onto so much anger toward this institution for being the way that it is because I have this idea that it shaped me, unwilling, into what I am today. I don’t want to give graduate school, or my first advisor, or Stanford the credit for making me this person that I like, who I think is actually pretty cool, because I was forced to become this person. Grad school happened to me. I had to withstand it. I didn’t choose it.
I discovered this week that I have to feel like I’ve made the choice freely in order to accept the self-actualization that results from the choice. Do you know what I mean? I'm angry at grad school because I feel like I didn’t have a choice coming to grad school, so I don’t want to credit grad school for the growth that I’ve experienced during my time here.
In contrast, take the class I taught last summer as an example. I crafted an original course and agreed to teach it to a class of 20 undergraduate students. Right before the quarter started, of course, I got nervous and wished I could cancel, but I didn’t. I had initially been so excited, so I stuck with it. And the $16,000 salary didn’t hurt either.
But that sensible financial incentive is not the reason I pitched the course in the first place. I created that course because I believed in teaching writing in a fun, approachable way. I believed in standing in front if a bunch of students and drawing on the whiteboard and encouraging their minds to try and try again. I freely chose that class, and so I can happily accept my personal development as a result of it. I can credit that opportunity with my higher confidence and competence and kindness.
My present situation with the EMT sequence is an opposite type of example. I hate that my choices are stay in the class that sucks because it’s free or quit the class and take it somewhere else for lots of money, and it might suck there too. Those are my two paths. Everybody, all together now: oh, clearly one of these roads is more sensible. I should stay in the EMT class for thirteen more weeks, bang my head against the wall for as many of them as it takes, and just get my stupid free certification because that makes sense.
Now, unfortunately, I am trying to grow up, for god’s sake. I am trying to self-actualize by making sense of my past, present, habits, hobbies, skills, talents. Maybe I should even try being less angry, because, as it turns out, when you are furious at the decisions you made because you feel like you didn’t freely make any of them, then you disregard all those parts of your life.
None of those things count! None of them made me who I am today, because I deserve to have become the person I should have been without those sensible decisions, without that pragmatic suffering!
You deny their influence on who you are because it feels so much better to keep holding onto your rage.
But then there is not a lot of yourself left over to make sense of.
