decisions, decisions.

What makes a decision? Is it fear of success, or fear of failure? Is it trying to stay, or trying to go? The desire for comfort, or escape?

I've repeated a lot of phrases lately, as follows:

This is the only time in my life I'll be able to do this.

If I don't do this, I'll regret it forever.

The things you regret in life are the things you don't do.

A year isn't so long. It'll be over in the blink of an eye.

For someone who has been so fond of sprouting out those cliched phrases lately, what the hell do they mean, anyway? A year "may not be so long", but think about everything that can change in a year. Life, death, marriages, divorces, loss, gain, grief, joy.

How do you make a decision like this? How do you decide to leave everything you've ever known, to fly out into the unknown? How do you leave the very things that make you feel safe, happy, and loved? How do you leave the very people that complete you? The people who hold you up when you feel most down? Who am I without those people? Am I just scared to find out? When you strip away everything I claim makes me ME, when you strip away everything I've built myself upon, what's left, exactly?

People have such faith in me that I'll make the "right" decision. Is any decision ever right? Or does every decision have tiny strings of regret and wonder attached? Is it human nature to lie awake and wonder what if what if what if?

No worries. It's just a year, after all. This is the only time in my life I'll be able to do this, and I'll totally regret not doing it. After all, it's the things you don't do in life that you end up regretting.

Right?