The last few years I’ve felt a familiar push and pull. Sometimes week by week, sometimes day by day, often swifter. A push and a pull urging me forward and holding me back. It takes on forms that have shaped lives over centuries – should I stay or should I go? In this job? City? Relationship? But has also taken unique form, my own inner voice, worming deep into my subsconscious and my contemplations. How are you, Samwise, going to deal with this? What do you, Samwise, want your future to be? How can you get there? Why is it not working out? Why is it so hard?

Small decisions are easy aren’t they? I think they are for me, at least. I don’t find it difficult to decide what to do with an evening, or to just go for it and book those concert tickets. I don’t find it hard to organise my inbox or buy groceries. I think if anything I can rush into these small decisions too quickly. Somewhat impulsively, I decided to try out a new style of underwear recently. Suffice to say, I should have trod more cautiously toward that particular decision. Pants aside, as a teacher, there is much talk about decision fatigue – the idea that after a day of making hundreds of decisions for small people, you find yourself incapable of making any further choices. I can see the truth in this – a recent period of living with my parents has been lovely in part because they often decide what’s for dinner for me! But on the whole, I don’t feel burdened by choice in the day to day.

When it comes to bigger than that, I’ve found my decision-making grinding to a halt. Decisions seem to take on a weight previously absent. Taking that job, making that choice, even going on that date, can seem like choosing a path with no way back if it goes wrong. Year after year, with jobs in particular, it has seemed recently like I am in a constant cycle of applying for jobs, second-guessing those opportunities, and then ending up rejecting interviews or offers out of fear or confusion. Yet the prospect of being job-less is also scary, especially while trying to secure a mortgage (more big decisions for me to spiral about…)

It has all felt like a slow car crash of paralysis. Sometimes I have felt, I do feel, like I’m vividly stuck; unable to move forward or make choices, out of fear that like pruning a limb from a tree, all those other green shoots and hopes will fall if I choose just one direction. Othertimes, I feel more deliberate, practical, considering choices rationally. But then this seam of bright emotion and fear cuts through me – What have I done? Have I missed the boat? What have you done?

It’s almost like I have some kind of fetish for flexibility. Maybe that’s a bit strong. But I certainly aspire after an idealised 2025 life of working from home. The idea of being able to do my washing on a weekday is certainly exciting. Of not having to balance health concerns with fears about upsetting the balance of work. As a teacher, it is a unimaginable dream to have that kind of work life. Often finding time for the loo is difficult enough.

I am increasingly aware that my jealousies and frustrations are focused on the things I envy and desire the most – one of those, at the moment, is the flicker of anger when I see or hear about other’s work schedules. After teaching primary children for almost fifteen years, the fear and desire intertwined in a ‘grass is greener’ way when considering other forms of employment is visceral for me. Not to mention debilitating when it comes to considering a way forward.

I don’t want to be fuelled by frustration or envy, but to find the next positive step myself, even if that feels hard to imagine at the moment. While discussing this with a friend recently, he decided to just ask ChatGPT (something I confess I have never done) and in listing my experience and qualifications to a freakily human computer generated voice, made me feel like this could be possible perhaps. That maybe I am not stuck, but just at a natural transition point. Suffice to say, ChatGPT had many useful suggestions and directions in which I could go. I need to strategise, with or without AI, to make some of those ideas work.

In that echoing place we find ourselves in sometimes, often when we can’t sleep or at the end of a long day, with different voices urging us on and holding us back, it can be so hard to navigate a way forward. But that is what we must, what I must, try and do. The vivid emotions of frustration and stress can burn us out; are reminders that something about the place we find ourselves in is unsustainable. I hope that in this fog of uncertainty, I can navigate a way forward.