What if I make the wrong decision?

I never really came home.

When I pulled into the driveway upon returning from Scotland, it felt like pulling into the parking lot of the toughest job I’d ever face.

I did not feel glad to be home. Instead, I recognised that this place where I had lived for 12 years had never felt like home. Everyone else belonged. My partner, my daughter, my mother-in-law. All tied by blood to the land, the generational house, the job.

While I did all the work to make it home; the housework, the decorating, the parenting, the social obligations, even now, after ten days away, I returned with the same question I had been asking for 12 years, every time I came home from even the simplest of trips out;

Will this ever feel like coming home?

The answer was now obvious.

But what did I do about it?

The early stage of exploring rupture in our lives evolves into a strange place of self-knowing. We now know something we cannot ever unknow. It settles in our core with a deep refusal to leave. We accept, inwardly, the desire for change, long before we are able to articulate it through action.

Nestled alongside that hope for more is a determination to hold onto what is still valued. We barter between desire and consequences. The place between what we know and what we need to begin is not a place of inaction, but of evidence gathering.

We falter on a painful doubt; ‘What if I make the wrong decision?’

Part of the challenge in this stage of change is relearning self-trust. Illumination often likes company. Once we can see that there is no going back, we tend to become aware that the current outcome is a direct result of choices we already made. As we begin to let go of the idealised potential outcome we’ve been holding onto and face more and more of the actual current outcome of those choices, we can experience a deeper sense of self-doubt.

Rupture may have brought us to this place, but now we are in limbo. Bartering limbo.

We must relearn how to trust the decisions that we are going to have to make.

Scotland had made me aware.

I couldn’t leave that lesson behind on the other side of the border and pretend it hadn’t happened.

I was aware that I could not just carry on. I could return, but I could never be the same. To do so would be a complete betrayal of myself, and my daughter. This was such a huge inner shift for me. I had gone from holding onto the hoped-for outcome I’d invested in so much, specifically for my daughter, to realising that staying miserable was not the role model I could allow, for my daughter.

Nestled alongside that hope for more was a determination to hold onto what I still valued. I was bartering too.

This wasn’t going to be a case of throwing everything up and starting again. When I returned, I insisted we went to relationship counselling, which we did for over two years. I still believed we could save our family. In fact, it was as important to me as ever.

I had to find a way to change what was without losing what was.

I believed that my awareness would lead to an equal awareness in those around me. Because I knew so clearly that change had to happen, I believed that we would all change together.

My epiphany felt inevitably collaborative.

I was in the limbo between knowing and doing.

Waiting for everyone around me to also wake up.

In this strange dichotomy of determination and inaction, I knew I needed to keep tuning into what I needed, and so I built a way of continuing to listen. Continuing to track my emotions and develop this system for listening to myself demanded that I not fudge the reality of my early efforts. At this point I was now tracking three key parts of my life.

My career change, my relationship efforts, and my role as a parent.

I kept these parts of my life more clearly separated now. The emotional leakage that had overwhelmed me before diminished. I could see that the separate parts of my life were not as painfully interwoven as I had thought. I could move forward in different ways, while holding space for the most painful parts of my life.

Quietly, I was also able to track two more core aspects of my life, my physical and mental wellbeing.

I began walking the dog away from home more often. This involved me making a daily decision. Not to do what was easiest and, between work and chores, walk the dog on the land I lived on. But to put her in the car and go out, back to old walks I had loved before I moved here. It reminded me of who I was in a small and yet very persistent way. It signified a small choice that went against the belief of my partner who espoused that we had everything we could possibly need on the doorstep. Perhaps he did. But not me. I liked to walk elsewhere.

And I settled fully back into my journaling habit on a daily basis. This is something that I know slips when I have abandoned myself. My journal is a place where I cannot fudge my voice. It is like staring full on into the mirror in the morning. You cannot escape if the spark in your eyes has died.

The impact of journaling on my mental wellbeing was immense. I had a space to stay honest with myself. To recognise the self-doubt, the bartering, and the desire to change my life. To hold it all, without slipping back into despair, anger, or numb acceptance.

Journaling was how I kept track of myself in the limbo.

Relationship counselling was exhausting.

We went through two counsellors in around 2 years.

Harboured in the hope that this counselling would work for us was the awareness that we were now investing even more heavily in the desire for success, while treading closer to the potential of failure.

The sessions were an emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes we’d leave more frustrated and angry than we arrived. Sometimes we’d have a glimmer of hope. But an inevitable part of the process was that we got outside input. Other people had eyes on the pathways in our relationship, and in our selves. We began to get feedback. Mostly about the potential damage we were inadvertently doing our daughter. This was a message that aligned with my own changed perspective.

I began to explore more around this point, the damage of staying together. The more I read, the more I began to see my own childhood in different eyes. The more I sat with the impact of both options, staying together or separating, the more I began to see that second choice as less crushingly like failure.

When the counselling hit its second impasse, and our second counsellor declined to continue working with us, we decided to take a break. It was nearly Christmas and we wanted to get through that without the pressure of counselling. We’d sit down and work out our next steps at the start of the new year, we said. That year was 2020. We watched the pandemic unfold through January, nervously ignoring our promise. Three months later we began the first lockdown, still together. A year later, as the third lockdown was announced, I sat heavily on the arm of the sofa.

I was exhausted. Exhausted of hope. That last year of the pandemic had put a microscope on our relationship that even counselling could not match. I knew without any doubt that our relationship was over. I sat down not because of the news. But because inside, finally, I knew I was ready for action.

It didn’t make the decision any easier, but I did it without any more bartering.

We may think that there is a direct step from knowing to acting.

But the limbo phase of desire is a process of answering the self-doubt. It is how we answer the fear that we might make the wrong decision.

Giving ourselves a way to navigate this time of hope and doubt, without throwing everything over, allows us the space to listen further, beyond the crisis.

Sitting through this incredibly painful period led me to a place where I had the information that I needed to be able to trust myself again.

But it took three years.

Three years from coming home knowing I could never unknow what I’d learned in Scotland, to reaching the point where I could accept that the consequence of my desire for change was loss.

I was constantly developing space for my desire to grow in one area, as I continued to barter with the impact in another. This was not comfortable space to live in. But it was essential work. It was release work.

The desire for re-authorship of my life necessitated accepting that my desire for change was not inevitably collaborative. The status quo that made me miserable suited others just fine.

Awareness inspires us. It gives us the immoveable ground that change must happen. That desire creates a reason to keep listening. This process is not the absence of action, it is the information gathering that gradually rebuilds self-trust and allows us the space to work out what the consequences of change might be.

While it might be easier to miss this phase, to throw your life out the window while you run out the door, it delivers the information and conviction about how you take the next steps.

Even in limbo, you are preparing the ground for what comes next.

Where next?

The Rewrite Philosophy

This essay explores Belief 6: Awareness inspires re-authorship

You might also enjoy Belief 5: Journaling creates narrative awareness, where I explore how writing helps us recognise the stories we are already living.

From the Rewrite Bookshelf

The book I’d hand you immediately after finishing this essay is Through a Glass, Darkly by Jostein Gaarder.

It’s a short bittersweet book about the process of letting go, and the hope of holding on.

Rewrite Today

Meet me on the edge of change in my fortnightly free newsletter.