You have a thing.
You know exactly what it is. The career you keep saying you'll try when the timing is right. The city you keep saying you'll move to eventually. The project you've been meaning to start for two years. Whatever it is, you've kept it alive as a possibility for so long it's basically furniture at this point. Just there. Always there. Comfortable in its thereness.
And it doesn't feel like a problem. It feels like the responsible move. Keeping your options open. Not rushing. Being smart about it. That's what people tell you to do when you're young, right?
The thing nobody tells you is what that open door is actually costing you.
Every option you keep open has a tax. You won't feel it today or this week. But it's running in the background constantly, draining the energy you could be putting into the things you've actually committed to. That low hum of unfinished business. The thing that sits in the back of your head during moments that are supposed to be good.
You're at dinner with people you love and some part of your brain is somewhere else. You're building something and it's going well but you can't fully celebrate it because you're still half-living in the version of your life where you chose the other thing. You're here but not fully here. And you've been so used to that feeling for so long that you've stopped noticing it's not normal.
That's the tax. Paid daily. In the parts of yourself you never fully give to anything because you're always holding something back for the thing you haven't chosen yet.
The door stays open because the moment you walk through it, the dream becomes real. And real things can disappoint you.
As long as the thing stays a possibility it stays perfect. The career you never pursued is still the career that would have made you happy. The city you never moved to is still the city where everything would have clicked. The project you never started is still the one that could have changed everything. The moment you actually try, the moment you close every other door and walk through that one, it becomes real. And real things are hard. Real things sometimes don't work out.
So you protect the dream by never testing it. And the years go by.
At 18 this made sense. Still figuring out what you liked, still collecting information about yourself, staying open was the right move.
But you reach a point where you already know what the thing is. And after that, staying open isn't smart anymore. It's just comfortable. And comfortable and the right thing are not the same thing, even though it's really easy to convince yourself they are.
Commitment isn't a personality trait some people are born with. It's a decision. A specific, slightly terrifying decision to stop protecting yourself from finding out and just find out. To let the thing become real, instead of keeping it perfect and hypothetical.
Yeah, you might try it and it might not work. The city might not feel how you imagined. The career might be harder than you thought. The project might fail. That's real and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
But right now, today, with the option still open and protected, you're already paying. You're already not fully here. Already splitting yourself between the life you're living and the life you're keeping on standby. And that's not free. It costs you something every single day.
Most people don't have it figured out and that's fine. But you already know about this one thing. The one that's been sitting there. That's the door.
Close it.
The timing will never be perfect. You'll never feel fully ready. And the longer you wait for that feeling the more of yourself you spend standing in the doorway instead of actually being somewhere. Pick the thing. Go all in.
You've been ready for longer than you think.
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See you on the next stair,
Alastair