Making Decisions

"Activity For You" app by Marisa Gaffney

Hello again. Everybody has at least one thing they feel they can’t stop being afraid of and for me it’s making decisions. It can be decisions about anything.

For example, I do not have many favorites. There are some, but if I was asked my favorite movie or song I would get nervous and say I like a lot of them. I do that because I’m afraid what I answer will be set in stone and I’m not sure if I can be committed.

In a coding class I took during the summer, we were supposed to come up with an idea for an app that would be helpful. For me I wanted to build an app that would assure me I was making the right decision about what the ideal activity would be for me to do. The way it works is you enter information about your personality, location, time and budget and it would come up with the one ideal activity so you’d never have to make a choice and you could do the activity feeling confident about your choice.

A big decision coming up is what I’m going to do with my life after high school. I don’t know what college I want to go to or what career I want. I know I still have time to figure it out, but I keep getting less time as things go on. If I pick something and it turns out to be the wrong thing for me then I’ll have start from scratch again to get back up, but that could be wrong as well. I’m interested in writing, computers, and photography, but I don’t know if I can truly like it by devoting my whole life to it. Everyone wants to me to have something planned, but I don’t.

Lately, whenever I try to relax about making decisions I feel like someone’s expecting me to be working and I worry about letting them down, which makes me stressed instead. I’ve been having nightmares about it and it leads to me waking up crying. That’s why I want to be less scared though. I’ll always be afraid, but if I become more confident in other things I’ll believe I’m getting closer to not being afraid all the time. My family is there to help me so I need to be there to help myself. I want to go to college, I want to get a job, and I want to have a career so even if it’s scary I need to not let it stop me in life and start making decisions.

Action and Reaction

I am going to talk about my behavior towards people. I’m always shy so I can never voice my opinion because even the slightest amount of criticism can hurt my feelings. It makes me jump to the conclusion that everything is wrong with me. I’ve tried being funny, saying things I heard on TV and my own stuff, but sometimes I can come of as sassy which gives people the wrong idea.

I now feel like people expect little out of me when it comes to being nice. I do get bored and complain, but I’m trying not to because I want to put whatever they think of me behind me. However, I still don’t feel safe since I wonder if people are watching me and thinking I’m being rude or inappropriate because I don’t enjoy what’s going on. There’s a possibility that they don’t think that, but I’m waiting to get yelled at instead of calming down. I try giving out more compliments and taking an interest in other people’s lives in order to be nice. Except, I’m not interested in hearing about things I don’t know. I mostly like to wait until it’s something I do know about and then I turn it into a whole discussion.

I also have a little anger since I want people to be unhappy when they make me do things I don’t want to do, but I know that’s wrong. For a long time because of my actions I have been feeling very stupid. I’ve hurt some people and thought I wouldn’t have had problems with them if I wasn’t so mean. It feels though that those people deserve to feel pain because they are doing something wrong, and they need to feel how it is when it is done to them. At least that’s what I think while I’m doing it.

There’s nothing I can do, but move forward. I can speak up knowing I’m entitled to my opinion. I can learn to listen to what people like that I don’t, and I can try to control my anger issues. Hopefully, I can get people to understand that I want to change, but I’ll have to do it by being more confident and kind, which is what I’m planning to do.