The first of two frameworks for living inside the consequences of a decision you’re proud of.
We’ve all been here. Facing a big decision, or even a small one. The precipice of collapsing every possibility into a single option. We close off all the infinite paths open to us, and yet open up a different set of possibilities that this one decision could lead to. It’s both liberating and scary. Living in the consequences of a choice can produce its own quiet panic. Did I make the right decision? Will I regret this? It’s really a case of trading decision fatigue for some version of buyer’s remorse.
I’ve made quite a few big decisions over the last seven years or so, decisions whose consequences meant my identity had to expand and contract at the same time, adjusting to a new baseline. That’s been the most exhilarating, scary period of my life. I won’t pretend I feel like I’ve fully landed on a baseline even now. Part of me is still settling into the current version of my life. The best change is slow, I’ll always say that. It gives you time to actually prepare, mentally.
What pregnancy taught me about pacing
I’ll liken this to when I was expecting my child. The first week of finding out, all my husband and I could do was consume content about early pregnancy and immerse ourselves in that world, until by week two we had to say, okay, pause. Let’s just live this day by day. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Morning sickness put a stop to most of our enthusiasm anyway, but I remember thinking, why not just have the baby now and start this process? Nine months felt so long.
Looking back, I genuinely appreciate how that pacing worked. It was a slow, steady process of letting the reality that I was growing a person actually sink in, and appreciating what the whole process was. The strange midnight hunger, waking up starving, eventually just eating two breakfasts. When she finally arrived, I was grateful it had taken nine months to prepare for her. I can’t imagine having a baby within two weeks of finding out I was pregnant. I’d have gone into shock at how all-consuming the change was. And even with all that preparation time, the first few months were still hard to adjust to. It didn’t immediately feel normal. There was a lot of guesswork involved, until somewhere past the six-month mark, I felt like I finally had it.
The version of you that decides isn’t the version that lives in it
All that to say, the version of you that makes a decision isn’t the same version of you who ends up living inside it. It’s almost like a slight identity jump. When I decided to move from Kenya, that was a completely different version of me than the one who arrived here, and the one living here now. My mind expanded in ways I never imagined. I became a wife. I went back to grad school. Soon after, I became a mother. I left a career that was already in full motion. Some days I can barely fathom what level of change I’ve actually made peace with, and with that comes the familiar what if I made a mistake. Did I make a mistake leaving my career, my country? Will my marriage survive, and was it worth all the adjustments we made for it?
Friends and family, watching all this, will say things like, wow, you’re so brave, I’d never do that. And there’s a particular kind of anxiety in people asking, so are you settled now? What do you do now? All of it well-meaning, but when you’re someone taking the changes in stride, at your own pace, mostly okay, being asked those questions at the wrong moment, when you’re naturally overwhelmed or just in a strange phase, starts to wear on you. It takes real mental awareness to recognize when you’re absorbing other people’s fears and worries versus what’s actually true for you. For the record, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been with my accomplishments and where my journey is leading me. But I’m still human, and I still get a flicker of, wow, am I really sure, and why am I sure?
Two frameworks, starting with this one
I’ve had to sift through a lot of noise to settle on the two frameworks that actually help me stay anchored in this new reality, living in the aftermath of decisions I’m proud of. Because at the end of the day, my starting point is always: am I proud of these decisions? Would I make the same ones again? As long as the answer is a resounding yes, I’d make them faster if I could.
The first framework is asking where your own sense of self-worth actually comes from. I have to be vulnerable here: when I sat down and deconstructed what some of these big decisions meant for my self-worth, I found that they’d actually inflated it. I had to perform something like delicate surgery to delink my self-worth from those external markers. Hard questions, asked directly to myself. If you took away my career, would I become less worthy just because I’m not in that circle anymore, can’t identify through my work? Is my worth tied to my marriage? If any of these things were taken away, would I become less worthy? Would I have a full mental breakdown because I had no idea who I was outside these roles?
Luckily for me, entering these roles was never really predicated on status or trying to inflate my sense of self-worth. It was about being in a place where I could use what I know to actually help. So the delinking wasn’t as hard as it could have been, because my heart had been in the right place going in. It led me back to gratitude, honestly. I’m grateful my own sense of self-worth isn’t too reliant on external validation. Just because I’m not actively working in the field I trained for doesn’t mean I stop having that knowledge, or that I can’t use it elsewhere. More importantly, it doesn’t mean I now feel lost, unsure of what my life means. If I lost my marriage, for instance, I wouldn’t fail to recognize who I am, because while it’s a huge part of my life, it isn’t everything. Plenty of other things feed my sense of personal worth. Which, again, leads back to gratitude, that I have a marriage where my own sense of self is still preserved, celebrated, even facilitated. So instead of living in fear of what if, I live in gratitude for what I’ve decided to be part of.
If your self-worth is tangled up in the decision
I understand this can get genuinely painful if you discover the opposite, that you had based your self-worth on the very thing in question, on one specific path. Undoing a big decision from that place is a tough, different process, and if you’re there, I can only empathize, because it isn’t pretty.
So the first thing I’d tell anyone who’s made a few key decisions in quick succession: sit down and honestly evaluate how much those decisions are feeding a false sense of self. Check the pride level. Has ego crept in? It’s worth naming that society often encourages you to attach your self-worth to exactly these kinds of things, career, marriage, status, which means the betrayal, if it comes, stings even more. You’re left with almost no one to blame but your own lack of judgment, or naivety. So make sure your self-worth is nurtured and built on what you actually decide it should come from. Best case, tie it to something no one can ever take from you. Your personhood. Your innate gifts. Your unique abilities and hobbies. Nurture those separately from external roles, so the core of you stays solid, and everything else becomes an added benefit, not the foundation. That’s not to say external roles mean nothing, they often do enrich your self-worth, adding real, complex layers to who you are. But taken in isolation, they’re a part, not the core. Your value belongs on the core, not the parts.
If you’re in the process of untangling your own sense of self-worth from a big decision, Renew90 offers a space to explore what your identity, habits, and mindset are actually built on. Available on iOS and Android.