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I am Absolutely Sure I Might Change My Mind
By Sarah Stodola
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It's always just been a function of being me that I can't make up my mind about anything. Or, to put it more accurately, I make up my mind all the time, but I never stick to it. I do decide things - really important things, life decision things - every day. And every time I make one of these decisions, I feel with all of my being that there could be no other way to decide. Sometimes I take days to renege, sometimes barely five minutes. But it seems that without fail, I always do. And the higher the stakes, the more I change my mind. The things I've felt the most adamant about took a little longer to fall, perhaps, but in the end, they always have, and in a much bigger way. It sometimes makes me feel like I don't have a character. Character is like a rock, steadfast, unwavering, defining. I'm like channel-surfing - there's so much there, but nothing sticks.
At age three, I swore up and down to anyone who would listen, which means my parents - sometimes - that I would never stop wearing dresses. I remember thinking it, and feeling 110% positively sure that there could never be a reason for me to wear pants. Anyone who looked at this with any sort of rationale would understand that dresses were prettier, girls who wore dresses were prettier. Life was better with me in a dress. By the time kindergarten rolled around, I was well on my way to tomboy-hood, uncombed bowl-cut hair, grass-stained pants, and becoming a monster on the playground.
When I was six, my family moved from Lake Placid, New York, to Lexington, Kentucky. I swore to my parents that I would never forgive them. Our relationship would be forever tainted. I vowed to hate Kentucky forever. I vowed to move back to Lake Placid just as soon as I became allowed to by law. I held my first serious grudge, something I learned later in life that I am good at. I don't forgive easily. That has never changed. But it hasn't been a decision, either. And anyway, a few months later I'd made friends with both of my next door neighbors and with Julie who lived down the street, and by the age of seven I barely remembered Lake Placid and how I thought my life was over when we left it.
It's seems that life floated along in a pretty decisionless manner between the ages of seven and ten. I can't remember being bothered by much, or having to sit awake at night deciding what to do about anything. I remember delivering a note from my teacher to the teacher in another classroom and when I got there a class bigmouth called me flat-chested in front of the entire unfamiliar population of the room. But I was only nine years old, and I was supposed to be flat-chested, and I knew it, so not even that spurred a decision on how to exact revenge, since the boy teasing me probably looked a little ridiculous in his choice of topic anyway. And it was partially my fault for wearing that really fitted one piece pink jumper deal, so all was forgotten nearly as soon as it happened, and my life without dilemma moved forward. And pretty soon I had my first boyfriend - I don't remember deciding that he would be my boyfriend. I think my friends made the decision for me. One day there was gossip and the next thing I knew I had a boyfriend. There was no decision involved.
Then I turned ten, and I began taking figure-skating lessons (My mother said, "Sarah, would you like to start skating again?" And I said, "Sure." No real decision involved). The fact that I couldn't skate anymore was a big factor in my bitter sentiment when we left Lake Placid for the decidedly non-winter sports Mecca of Lexington. So as soon as I set foot on the ice, for the first time the second time, I was in love with it. I decided that I wanted to be a figure-skater and nothing else. I didn't want a social life, I didn't want boyfriends. I wanted to skate. I became obsessed. By the time I was twelve, I was skating for two hours before school and two hours after, five days a week. I was taking dance classes and I was lifting weights and I was leaving home during the summers to train. I swore I would never, ever, under any circumstances, quit skating. By the time I turned eighteen, I realized and began to accept that I would never be an Olympian, and college loomed on the horizon, and I changed my mind. At the present, I haven't set foot in an ice rink in over two years.
At thirteen or fourteen years of age, I acquired a general interest in sports. This surely stemmed from my personal experience. I was now a competitor, and a physical competitor at that, so I naturally took an interest in the physical competitiveness of others. Since I lived in Lexington, it naturally followed that the University of Kentucky basketball team would become my number one favorite sports team. I cried and cried when it lost to Michigan and the Fab Five in overtime during the Final Four. I'd never cried over a boy before, or a fight with a friend. The competition, however, captured me. I decided nothing else mattered. I watched in utter horror as my team lost in the second round of the NCAA tournament a couple of years later. My freshman year of college UK won the National Championship. I drove the three and half hours down to UK's campus from Indiana University in order to celebrate the victory.
By the end of college, though, I'd lost interest in sports. At this point, I don't even know who won the Super Bowl last year. And now I've reversed my decision and concluded that it's a terrible waste of time to sit around and watch sports on television in any sort of quantity. I used to spend Sunday mornings watching Sports Center. Now I think it's much better to spend it watching Meet the Press.
I also swore I would never ever drink or do drugs. "There's something wrong if you need to be drunk to have a good time." "I'm silly enough without getting drunk." Sound familiar? I bet there were at least a few of me running around most high schools in America. I perceived that only bad kids drank. Besides, I had my skating career to think about. I got drunk for the first time shortly after my seventeenth birthday, and I became a convert before my first hangover. Either good kids did in fact drink or I was in all truthfulness a bad kid. A year later I smoked weed. And then I went away to college.
It was during college that my endless revolving cycle of hair-length began. I had the same length hair all through high school, and for the first couple of years of college. Then I decided to go short. Cutting my hair short was something I literally craved. I would walk across campus and see girls with short hair and I would yearn to have my own locks cut. So I finally did it. And I loved it for about two weeks. And after that I would take that same walk across campus and see the girls with long hair and that same old yearning for what I didn't have would creep into me. And I would immediately begin the painfully slow process of growing my hair back out to its former length. But it didn't end there. The hair would get long, and its length would lose its appeal. And it would get cut again, and then grown out again. I'm currently in a growing phase...
Aside from a couple of instances, I didn't really start dating until college. The fact that I began dating wasn't a changing of my mind in itself. In high school, I always knew that someday I would do it, I just couldn't be bothered with it yet. When I did start, I swore I would never get serious about it. I witnessed what became of those who did take dating seriously - the drama, the attachment, the sadness, the lack of independence. Dating for me would be an entity on the side. This worked all through college. And then I moved to DC, and in spite of my convictions, I fell for one of these guys who was supposed to be "on the side." And I changed my mind again by deciding to incorporate love - or at least the idea of it - into my life, albeit pretty damn grudgingly.
When I got to college, I had little knowledge of what I might want to do with my life. I'd always just been a skater, and when I changed my mind about that, I was seventeen years old and perhaps a bit behind my peers in pondering a future career. I knew I liked to write, so I became a journalism major. I stuck with the major all the way through to the graduation, surprisingly enough. However, my freshman year I had a class with a professor who I came to greatly admire. Her specialty was broadcast journalism. So I went into broadcast journalism. And then I realized, too late as it turned out, that you didn't really do much writing in the world of television. But I stuck with it because I wanted to graduate on time, and because I thought it would be easy to get a job at a cool place like National Geographic or a national network. When that didn't happen in my first month of job-searching, I made a concrete change of mind about the whole broadcasting thing. I ended up working as an editorial assistant for an internet startup, and then I decided I wanted nothing to do with journalism. Instead, I would be a writer, as in novels, short stories, essays. I'd been dabbling in this in my spare time for a few years, and after the internet startup went under, I decided I would become a writer, and I moved to New York.
The course of my interest in books correlated with my early career choices. During my journalism years, I read nonfiction (if I read at all). By the end of college, though, I'd discovered fiction, and I fell hard for it. It all started with The Age of Innocence. I read this book of Edith Wharton's and I understood how fiction could make such brilliant commentary on real life, and it could do so in a way that nonfiction - and especially journalistic writing - couldn’t. In my teenage years, I'd claimed that fiction was silly. By my twenties, I adored it - a prototypical 180. And so typically me, to extol the thing which a couple of years earlier I'd denounced.
And then, of course, there's the matter of money. I've switched my mind so many times on this topic, I'm not sure I could document the entire course of my decision-making and reversing. I've changed my mind broadly and I've changed it specifically. An example of a broad change of mind would be me going from the contention that anything less than six figures is simply not enough to get by on, to working in a bar so I can write during the days and allowing myself $150 of "fun money" every week. An example of specific - seeing a shirt I really love but know I can't afford, leaving the shop, only to return the next day having somehow justified its purchase to myself. Sometimes I have contempt for those who value money and arrange their lives accordingly. Sometimes I wish I were one of them.
The list goes on - interminably. When I started working at the bar, I had a blast. I thought I would need to do nothing but write during the day and work at the bar at night for years to come in order to keep happy. After barely a year, I'd had enough. I also thought I'd never go to grad school, because who needs grad school when you've got books to read and a laptop for your writing. Last week I started my second semester in a masters program at the New School. For the past few years I've sworn that I don't want to be anywhere but New York City ever again. I swear I don't want to get married or have kids. But I've changed my mind about so many things in the past that I've felt equally as sure of that I know I can't trust myself anymore. I would like to have conviction in these matters. And I do, but I place an asterisk next to all them, a caveat that I reserve the right to change my mind about any of them at any time, without any outwardly clear reason.
I justify my chronic indecision with the assertion that any thinking person must change their minds throughout the course of his/her life. And this, I believe, is true. If you pursue knowledge, and new ideas and facts are continually entering you mind, then it seems inevitable that at some point a bit of new information will leave you with no option but to change a viewpoint.
My indecision seems to define me more clearly than most actual decisions I've made. However, there are those things that have always just been. And while I don't look at them as decisions, they are in fact just that - it's just that the choices in these cases were so entirely obvious to me that I don't consider them to have been decisions. Going to college was a decision, being liberal was a decision, spending time writing was a decision, leaving the Midwest was a decision. And I've never looked back on any of these, I've never second-guessed them. These non-decisions have been the cornerstones of my life. So while some of the time I feel like I'm just floating around in this world, not sticking, the truth is that there are certain things about me that have stuck so soundly that I don't distinguish them from the genuine unalterable truths, like height or IQ. It turns out that I do have character, after all. It's just that there is a blinding swirl of indecision surrounding the solid choices. But if one were so inclined, he could decide to use the word "spontaneity" in place of "indecision," and all of a sudden that swirl becomes a lot more interesting.
And I do believe that keeping things interesting is something I could never decide against.
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