A few years ago, I was sitting in a therapist's office. The first thing many therapists do is come to see me over those ten years and more. This was the third of six sessions that I needed to attend, as stipulated in the treatment plan attached to the recent complex PTSD diagnosis I received.
The therapist was an older woman whom I quite liked, and while the first two sessions didn't feel very helpful, they consisted of her returning me to a comfortable reclining chair. It steamed enough hot tea to make me want to come back every week for the rest of my life, enough to make sure someone doesn't become a proper mother.
To be honest, I don't remember much from those sessions. There were no life-changing insights. I don't know if I really touched on the childhood traumas I had begun to unravel over the years. But at that time, I was struggling not only to make decisions but even to clarify the reasons for the struggle. Like Sylvia Plath's Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, I felt confused, conflicted, and indecisive:
"I saw myself sitting on the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet."
It wasn't just a big thing. It was a life-changing choice I was facing. That was all. I was consumed with indecision in the most neurotic way, but I found it difficult to explain to the therapist. The best thing I could come up with was an anonymous quote I found on the internet.
"I have a problem now. There is a clusterfuck of ideas, options, angles, and directions attached to solving this problem, and I am caught up in it. I scan all the options, weigh them all, and the net result after everything has been considered is... nothing. Imagine there are 234,746,853 strings attached..."