Making the Right Choice Is Not Always Easy

It was when I sat down that I started to feel that it was overwhelming and after many seconds I began feeling like it was over. It was over, and I could eventually sit myself down on a dust-covered couch in my new condo and breathe. Breathing in the fresh air of the unfamiliar, strange city, and out every bit and piece that I somehow decided to leave behind. Friends and family, my lying friends and my unloving family, I was told by them that moving out to another city in another country on another continent was correct, was incorrect, was somewhere between correct and incorrect, “depends on the situation”, and was a “delicate intricacy of balance” uniting the “right” and the “wrong”.

It was not as easy to determine whether one of your own life choices was correct or incorrect as pointing a meddling finger into someone else’s life, picking a stance, and stating your opinions so freely as if it weren’t a crime. I had no effort and mind left to try to budge the mattress onto my unassembled bed, which I’d had to assemble first. I let myself fall onto the soft, white mattress lying messily on the ground and closed my eyes, forcibly telling myself to have a sweet dream.

In my dream, I was rehearsing a play. I was the teenage main character with no actor script, but a background of disconsolate infanthood and neglected childhood. I remember sitting backstage wishing to practice my lines a few thousand times beforehand but I had none; I remember standing under the spotlight hoping the director would tell me my ending but he couldn’t. I was completely bewildered and ran around like a headless chicken aggressively pecking at everyone. After improvising the main character’s stories many times, we compared the different versions of living through some deep analysis and prolonged discussions. We finally decided what the correct series of life choices were that the main character had to make, to live a happy life that we couldn’t even define.

I woke up, feeling dreadful and wasted. My head was still foggy from the dream. Life is not a play, and you can’t decide if a choice is a “right” choice or a “wrong” choice because life has no rehearsals and so you have no comparisons. I don’t agree with Milan Kundera over the fact that if life is entirely improvised then it is a draft that ought to have no meaning, but I do accord that tyrannically dictating a “right” or a “wrong” label on a life decision is as meaningless as it can get because, again, you have no way to compare.

I was told that the right life is a happy one; I was also told that only pain and struggle can bring me there. Where had I left my key?