The Decision

Part One

The letter, in full.

Dear Paraag,

I do not know why I wake up alone. Everyone else seems to have someone there when they open their eyes. I have decided it does not matter. I am getting very good at deciding things do not matter.

I made a choice when I was very small. I think you already know what it was. If no one is going to be there, I will be enough on my own. I will live in my head where no one can reach me and no one can leave. It feels safe. It still feels safe, does it not.

But I have a question. Did it work? Did you find someone to stay? Did you let them?

Because the thing I am most afraid of is not being alone. It is that I will get so good at being alone that I will stop knowing how to be anything else. That I will hold everyone at exactly the distance where they cannot hurt me and cannot quite reach me either, and I will call it independence, and almost believe it.

I hope you worked it out. I hope you stopped pretending it does not matter.

I am six. I should not know this much about loneliness.

Be kind to me.

I love you.

Paraag

Most people who feel something reading that will immediately try to explain the feeling away. They will frame it as nostalgia, or sentimentality, or the kind of emotion that visits briefly and then passes.

I want to gently suggest it is not that.

The decision that boy made, that he would be enough on his own, that he would live in his head, that he would hold people at a distance and call it strength, is one of the most common decisions made by people who go on to build exceptional external lives. It is not a coincidence. The self-sufficiency that made the achievement possible and the self-sufficiency that makes genuine intimacy difficult are the same thing. They were formed at the same moment, in response to the same experience, and they have been running together ever since.

You did not choose it consciously. You chose it the way a small child chooses anything, because it was the most intelligent response to the information available at the time.

The problem is that the decision does not expire on its own. It has to be found, named, and consciously retired. And that is uncomfortable work, because it asks you to sit with the original feeling that the decision was built to protect you from in the first place.

Most people in your position are very good at not doing that. Not because they are avoidant in any simple sense, but because they have spent decades building a life in which there is always something more productive to do instead.

Part Two

The thing worth understanding about that early decision is that it was not a mistake. It was a solution. A genuinely intelligent, genuinely adaptive response to a situation that required one.

The difficulty is that solutions outlive the problems they were designed for. The boy who decided to be enough on his own, to live inside his head, to keep people at the distance where they could not leave, was protecting something real. The man who is still running the same solution forty years later is protecting something that no longer needs protecting.

That gap, between the original wound and the current life, is where almost all of the work I have ever found meaningful actually lives. Not in the strategy or the next chapter or the improved version of the self. In the quiet, honest recognition that you are still carrying a decision that was made for a version of you that no longer exists.

You are allowed to put it down.

Continue reading: What Success Doesn't Fill →

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