Letting go of decision fatigue

the upside of aging out of so much opportunity

One of the most difficult parts of growing older is realizing that you have fewer and fewer opportunities in your life. This month I wind up my 59th year and enter my 60th, and I am coming to accept that I will never live with a view of the sea, I will never be an influential YouTuber, I will never go to art school and become a painter.

At the same time …

One of the best parts of growing older is realizing that you have fewer and fewer choices and opportunities in your life. It’s not that there is anything in particular you can’t do as you age (with a few exceptions, of course), but what becomes clearer and clearer is that you can’t do everything. When I was the mom of young kids, a friend gave great advice: “You can have it all, just not all at once.” Those were very comforting words then, but now, on the downhill side of “having it all, just not all at once,” I know that I can’t actually have it ALL, and I never could. Everyone must make choices about what matters, what paths we will take, and which ones we won’t—and those choices will eventually dictate the paths that remain open to us. The more we choose, and the older we get, the fewer and fewer realistic opportunities lie ahead.

Where I would LOVE to live … instead, I’m writing a novel set there.

But this is not bad news! Not at all. Especially in our creative lives, some amount of constraint is a blessing. It might seem like constraint is limiting, and something to rebel against, but actually constraint, like any good boundary, gives us a more manageable universe of choices to make. A sonnet is a form of constraint—it offers poets a pattern within which to work. They can play around, experiment, break the rules—but the traditional pattern of a sonnet gives them a starting point, bumpers to bounce off of.

When I started writing on Instagram, I actually loved the 2200 character constraint of an Instagram caption because it forced me to write shorter and be more concise. The downfall of Twitter, in my estimation, happened far before Elon Musk—it was when they abandoned the 140 character limit.

I suppose I could find a way to live by the sea someday, but that would take me away from the community I have built locally, and away from my beloved children who seem happy to stay put in the neighborhood they were raised. I hope to visit the sea more often some day, but more and more I’m content to sink my roots right here in the home I have created with my partner.

I probably do have the ability to become an influential YouTuber, and it will always be a medium I love, but it just requires too damn much bandwidth, and I’d rather support Jesse who almost certainly will become an influential YouTuber if that’s what they decide to do (go check out their new video essay and subscribe to their channel Slugtown!)

Ditto art school: it’s hardly impossible: Nell Painter, a Princeton historian and author of The History of White People, retired as a professor and at age 64 started over in art school, earning first a BFA, and then an MFA. She even wrote a book about it, Old in Art School: A Memoir of Starting Over. Nell Painter almost certainly opted out of some other opportunity to devote so much of her later life to art. And the truth is, I love making art, but I love even more not trying to be great at it. It’s ok to have hobbies, and art is mine.

What letting go of those possibilities means, though, is that it has become easier to commit to a few things that really are in my grasp. There is much that is not ideal about where I live, but there is plenty that I love, and having settled into the likelihood of staying here, I feel really good about putting a lot of effort into creating a space that I love to be in. Accepting the reality that this is likely my home for a very long time, if not forever, has also helped me muddle through the messy middle of this interminable redecorating project (it’s been well over a year now) and push on the the finish, which is now very much in sight (a big reveal soon!)

Finishing projects is not my strong suite, as is true for many of us neurodivergent folks, but being settled in a choice has made it much easier not to get distracted by shiny new things. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with not finishing projects, or with shiny new things, but in this second act of my life, it feels good to start finishing things. In fact, my self-imposed deadline for my home renovation project coincides with the beginning of my Novel Year. I am doing a year-long program with my friend KR Moorhead to support me in finishing this novel I’ve been working on for several years now. I’m so excited, both to get back to the novel, and to have a beautiful and comfortable home to write in.

With fewer choices, I’m finding more clarity and capacity for the choices that remain. It feels good.