Decision paralysis demon

My sleepless nights ridden with delusional ambitions, fear of failure, and loneliness

Living at home for the past ten months has felt like I had put my life on pause. Like a 20-minute intermission during a Broadway show where the audience gets up to go pee, stretch their limbs, and reorient themselves in reality again. When I moved back home, I was a confused girl who had lost control of her narrative and needed a break from the unrelenting responsibilities of adulthood. I didn’t know which city to live in and I was restricted by the geographical constraints of my job, so I resorted to the fallback of moving back in with my parents, an option I’m privileged to have. It was an opportunity to save $2k a month by living rent-free and devote more undivided attention to focusing on my career. But now, I find myself hopelessly stuck in the intermission trying to figure out how to continue my story. Every day feels mundane—on the weekdays, I drive to work after a late breakfast, grab my daily cup of matcha latte, and sit in front of my laptop pretending my company isn’t trying to automate me out of my job. Then, when the clock hits an hour that is not too suspiciously early, I leave the office to drive back home, where I unwind with the same rotation of Parks & Recs YouTube clips to replenish the serotonin I lost during the work day. At this point, I’m so drained from doing nothing all day that I continue to do nothing. The only form of activity my brain can afford to do is read brain rot tweets or watch videos of cats. And the weekends… well, the weekends are simply a chance for me to sleep in.

I consider myself a very decisive person. I know what I like and what I don’t like. Ordering at restaurants is a piece of cake for me. Deciding my outfit the day of is barely a task. I have probably never spent more than 30 minutes at a grocery store. I also consider myself a very driven person. I know what I want and will do anything to get it. One does not simply earn bachelor’s degrees for two of the most competitive undergraduate majors. One also does not simply take a full course load during an internship simultaneously—not once, not twice, but three times—with a sane mind. If you knew me in college, you knew me as the girl who was perpetually “busy,” because I always had a finish line in mind and worked like hell to cross it.

This ultimately begs the question: why am I being such a pathetic sloth now when it comes to working towards my dreams and ambitions?

Adapting to post-grad, full-time career life was a challenge for me. For the first time, I didn’t feel like I needed to keep my resume in tip-top shape anymore. I work at a company where work-life balance is plentiful and championed by its employees. That left me a lot of spare time every day. But living in the suburban towns of South Bay drained me emotionally. In college, a 10-minute walk could get you to five different boba shops and all your friend’s apartments. But here, a 1-hour drive is the reason why you see your friends in SF every month—or week if you’re dedicated enough. My introversion, something I had always been comfortable with, festered like mold in a compost bin to the point that it was deeply revolting. I haven’t made any new friends from work and often would go a week without speaking a word to anyone who wasn’t a coworker or a family member. A 2-hour social interaction will have me overthinking my sentences, tone of voice, and facial expressions for days. I have become a memory archive to my existing friends because I remember things they have said or events in their lives better than they do themselves.

I can keep blaming my environment for my stagnant and isolated social life and inability to progress in other areas like my career. However, I have come to the troubling realization that my social reclusion is worsened by the stalemate between my lofty ambitions and a crippling fear of my failures being publicly perceived. I work tirelessly in secret because I don’t want people to see my sluggish progress or embarrassing mistakes. Instead, I want them to appreciate only the final and best version of my work, which I never share anyway because I either never finish or it falls short of my high expectations. On top of that, I feel guilty when I spend too much time hanging out with friends because doing so means I’m neglecting an overflowing backlog of unrealistically scoped tasks and deadlines that were impossible for me to keep up with in the first place. But does my painful self-awareness teach me to, perhaps, recalibrate my expectations, set reasonable deadlines, and, dare I say, try things for the sake of learning and personal growth rather than worrying about how my failures might look in the eyes of others? And will changing my mindset in that way, maybe, just maybe, lead to immensely positive impacts on my social life and mental health? But also, like, shoot for the moon and you’ll land in the stars, right? And what if you plummet straight back down to earth for everyone to watch?

I consider myself a very decisive person. But some decisions are much harder to make than others. My goals are so big that they scare me because failure is practically guaranteed. And my fear of failure is so all-consuming that it’s driven out any motivation to even try. Today, I am stuck in this headspace where I would rather stay in a position of familiar mediocrity than make a choice that brings temporary discomfort in exchange for a chance at a better future. Every night, I go to bed feeling like a paradoxical victim of decision paralysis. I watch as life goes on for my friends as they move on to bigger and better things, while I stay immobilized by this fear and crushed by the idea that I will never live up to my own expectations.