I have spent too many nights sick to my stomach over decisions I haven’t even made yet. I am terrified of choosing wrong or terrified of not choosing at all.
There is something uniquely suffocating about standing at the edge of your own life and realizing no one is coming to choose it for you. The world isn’t going to wait until you feel ready and it certainly isn’t going to reward you for how much potential you quietly possess. The world rewards the people who move before they feel fully formed.
Time is supposed to be on our side, youth as well. It’s supposed to all work out but time moves on, whether we do or not.
The Illusion of Potential
Potential is seductive, we romanticize it because it feels safe and infinite. It feels productive to sit on ideas — the career we could pursue, the city we could move to, the version of ourselves we could become but untouched potential is just possibility — and possibility is invisible.
The world does not reward the person who could have, it rewards the one who did.
You could be the most talented person in the room — the most creative, the most capable but if you never risk letting the world see what you can do, no one will ever know. There will always be someone ahead of you — someone louder, someone less qualified but more willing to try.
All you have to do is start moving. Momentum will carry you and that momentum creates opportunity.
The Fig Tree Analogy
This concept has festered in my mind alongside the fig tree analogy in “The Bell Jar” by Sylvia Plath.
In the novel, the protagonist imagines her life branching out before her like a fig tree. Each fig represents a different future — love, career, travel, intellect, recognition. Every option is ripe, full, desirable and beckoning, she wants all of them but choosing one means losing the rest and so she sits there, paralyzed, starving. As she hesitates, the figs wrinkle, darken and fall to the ground.
When I first read this, it felt dramatic — now it feels uncomfortably accurate.
The tragedy isn’t that she lacks opportunity, it’s that she believes choosing incorrectly would be worse than not choosing at all — that indecision will somehow protect her from loss.
The truth is, it doesn’t.
Time makes the choice for you if you refuse to make it yourself.
As a young woman, I see my own tree heavy and laden with fruit — a million possible selves I would love to become. I want to be ambitious and untamed and accomplished and free. I want to taste everything but in this one life I own, I cannot possibly grasp every fig.
The awareness of that limitation can feel crushing.
The Fear of Choosing
What if I reach for one and it’s not the one I was meant to choose?
What if the “right” future slips past me because I was too busy experimenting?
What if I get it wrong?
I have spent nights nauseous over this— both petrified of my future and desperate for it to begin. There is a strange cognitive dissonance in wanting everything and knowing you cannot have it all. My heart wants to taste every fig but my head reminds me I can’t.
For a long time, I let that tension keep me suspended in indecision — sitting safely in the crotch of my tree.
Indecision feels harmless in the moment, it feels cautious, responsible, even but it is still a choice. Sitting and waiting under the tree is still an action and time does not pause out of respect for your anxiety.
Avoiding choice does not eliminate loss — it simply guarantees that your figs fall untouched.
Trade-Offs and the Myth of the Perfect Path
When I’ve voiced my frustration about the finite nature of life, about wanting to live expansively and fearing being domesticated before I’ve discovered myself, I’ve been told, “There are going to be trade-offs no matter what you choose.”
It’s true — and I hated hearing it.
Why should I have to mourn lives I’ll never live? Why should freedom feel like something I’m constantly negotiating away?
Avoiding trade-offs isn’t possible and avoiding action doesn’t protect you from regret, it just delays the process. Every path eventually closes others off. This is not cruelty — it’s reality.
The mistake is thinking there is one perfect fig that will satisfy every hunger — there isn’t.
Embarrassment Is Better Than “What If”
I have spent so much energy trying to calculate the safest move, the most efficient path, the one with the least regret attached to it. I’ve waited to feel worthy enough, polished enough, even certain enough. Meanwhile, there will always be someone more qualified, someone more experienced, someone already moving.
Another person’s momentum does not invalidate mine and waiting until I feel “ready” will not make me more deserving of opportunity.
At some point, I know I will take a risk and fall flat on my face. I know I will send something out into the world and be met with silence. Rejection is inevitable, embarrassment is survivable but regret is heavier.
We are already doomed with an expiration date, perfection is unattainable. Trying to appease the world will never appease your own heart. I would rather embarrass myself a few times and know I tried than play it safe and live a life haunted by “what if.”
The world rewards audacity — not because audacity guarantees success but because it guarantees movement.
Choosing To Be Brave
There is privilege in being young with an unknown future. It is a gift to feel this intensely, to look at the world with hunger and curiosity, it is also overwhelming — abundance can paralyze you if you let it.
My fig tree is still full. The fruit is still within reach. I cannot taste every fig but I can reach for something. I can choose to move, I can choose to risk.
Our 20s — and really, any decade we are lucky enough to inhabit — are not meant to be preserved in fear. They are meant to be lived — messily, boldly, audaciously — with the humility that comes from being told “no.”
The world will not reward the life I almost lived, it will reward the risks I took.
Potential is not nourishment — and I refuse to starve in abundance.
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