Do I Create My Own Problems?
Not Everything in Life Is Just Done to Us
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There are two kinds of bad decisions. The first kind is when you genuinely have no idea what you’re walking into, and nobody can really fault you for that, because you can’t avoid a hazard you can’t see. The second kind is when you have a pretty good idea, a small voice in the back of your head, and you proceed anyway because you want something badly enough to ignore it. I’ve made plenty of both. Lately I’ve been trying to sort them into the right categories, partly out of curiosity and partly because the answer changes what I’m actually supposed to learn from them. A mistake made out of ignorance calls for education. A mistake made out of willful optimism calls for a much more uncomfortable conversation with myself.
I’ve been called naive, and had it implied that I make bad decisions. Friends, partners, and even family members have questioned my judgment at various points, and while I don’t agree with every criticism I’ve received, I can’t pretend none of it was earned. Some of my decisions have cost me financially, some have cost me professionally, and some have taken a fairly significant toll on my self-esteem. When I look back at all of it, the question that keeps surfacing is how much of it was avoidable. So let’s go through it.
When I was 23, I was having a hard time finding work, and I eventually landed a temporary, part-time position through a staffing agency. When my temporary status ended, the company offered me a full-time job, and I turned it down. I hated that job, seriously, and I decided I would rather leave than keep doing something that made me miserable. My plan, such as it was, rested on one assumption: the staffing agency would find me something else quickly, because they had done it before. That was the entire plan. I turned down a guaranteed paycheck based on an agency’s track record, which is a bit like declining a lifeboat because the water has been calm so far. They did not find me something else quickly. I ended up unemployed for somewhere between two or three months, struggling financially, and feeling completely stupid. I had no other job lined up, a very small financial cushion, and no backup plan, and I hadn’t seriously considered what would happen if things didn’t go the way I expected. In my defense, I was young, unhappy, and I overestimated how easy the next opportunity would be. I also made a real choice to trade something certain for something I had only assumed, and there’s no way to dress that up as anything other than poor judgment.
Then there was my first real corporate job after graduating. It was a professional position, relevant to my degree, and I was excited to finally be somewhere that felt like the beginning of an actual career. I made the mistake of trusting a coworker too much. She had opened up to me about personal things, and because she was willing to be vulnerable with me, I assumed I could be vulnerable back. I told her about my frustrations with the job and how I wasn’t particularly happy there. We were friendly, and I thought we had built a level of trust. Then one day she arrived pretty late to work — I mean two and a half hours late. When she finally showed up in her office, I went over and asked if everything was OK. For whatever reason, this offended her and I’ll never forget her response, “Everything’s fine. You don’t need to send the troops out looking for me.” A short time after that she took the things I’d told her straight to my boss. My boss began treating me differently, and within about six weeks, I was fired. Obviously, my coworker was responsible for what she chose to do with the things I told her, and my boss was responsible for how she handled that information. But I also learned something about myself, which is that I had been far too comfortable sharing professional frustrations with someone I barely knew. I had confused friendliness with trustworthiness, and I had mistaken someone’s willingness to confide in me for evidence that she would handle my confidence responsibly. That one, I think, goes in the first category. I really didn’t know better yet. I didn’t understand that you can like someone, and even have a perfectly nice lunch with them, and still not hand them ammunition. It was an expensive lesson, especially because it happened at the first real professional job I had worked so hard to get.
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The relationships are where the second category gets crowded. I once stayed in a relationship for four years that probably should have lasted about six months. We were not a good match in any way you can think of. Our maturity levels were nowhere near each other, our ambition and motivation were completely different, and what we wanted from life, along with our values and morals, didn’t line up in any way that mattered. That incompatibility showed up the way it tends to, in the form of explosive, toxic arguments. It was a horrible relationship, honestly, and I think the arguments were so bad precisely because we were two people pulling in opposite directions and calling it a partnership. I knew things weren’t right. I knew it often, and I knew it during the arguments, and I knew it in the quiet stretches afterward when everything was supposedly fine. I stayed anyway. Part of it was that I had spent so long wanting a boyfriend and a solid relationship that when I finally had one, I wasn’t eager to give it up, even if it turned out to be the wrong one. I had put in so much time and energy that leaving felt like admitting the investment was a loss, so I kept investing, which is a terrible strategy in every context but is apparently extremely popular in relationships. Somewhere along the way I started treating the idea of being single again as a fate worse than being unhappy with someone, and that was simply not true. I can look back now and ask what on earth I was thinking, and the honest answer is that I wasn’t thinking so much as negotiating. I was holding onto the idea of a relationship and not the one I was actually in.
The same pattern showed up with guys who were interested in me, or, more accurately, interested in one particular aspect of me. I took their attention as genuine interest, as someone actually liking me as a person, when looking back it was pretty clear they were only interested in me physically. I’d love to say I was fooled, but I don’t think that’s accurate. Deep down, I think I knew. I just didn’t want to admit it, because admitting it meant giving up the version of the story I was enjoying, and that version was a lot more flattering than the real one. I hadn’t been tricked so much as I had been very committed to not looking at the evidence. And yes, I got hurt as a result, which in hindsight was the least surprising outcome possible.
When I put all of these experiences next to each other, the stories are different, but the mechanism isn’t. In nearly every case where I had a chance to see what was coming, I wanted something badly enough that I built a reason to ignore it. I wanted the job to be somebody else’s problem, I wanted the relationship to be solid, and I wanted the attention to mean something more than it did. And wanting, it turns out, is very persuasive. It never argues that the risk isn’t real. It just argues that this time will probably be fine, that the other person will change, that the opportunity will show up eventually, that things will work themselves out. We find explanations that let us keep doing what we already wanted to do, and sometimes those explanations turn out to be spectacularly wrong.
That brings me back to the question I started with, which is whether I look for my own problems. I don’t think I deliberately seek out hardship. However, I do think there have been times when I prioritized what I wanted over what was actually sensible. I let optimism override judgment, extended trust too quickly, or stayed somewhere long past the point where staying made sense. The difference between a mistake made from inexperience and a mistake made because you saw it coming and decided not to look is the difference that matters, and the second one is harder to think about. It’s also where accountability lives. I don’t want to be someone who spends her life blaming circumstances, other people, or bad luck for every single difficult thing that has happened to her. Sometimes people treat us terribly, and that is entirely on them. Other times we find ourselves in situations we never could have anticipated. But truthfully, there were occassions I contributed to my own circumstances through the boundaries I didn’t set and the information I chose to ignore, and it’s important to be honest about that.
Accountability doesn’t mean treating every bad thing that has ever happened to me into my fault. There’s a difference between recognizing that I made a poor decision and deciding that I deserved the consequences; or between acknowledging that I should have walked away sooner and taking responsibility for another person’s behavior. And there’s a very real difference between learning from my mistakes and punishing myself for them on a recurring basis, which is a hobby I’ve had in the past and do not recommend.
There’s a danger in judging every decision I’ve ever made using the knowledge I have today. At 23, I didn’t have the same professional experience I have now, and I hadn’t learned certain lessons about financial security, workplace relationships, or the importance of a backup plan. In my twenties, I didn’t have the perspective I have now about people’s intentions, boundaries, or what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like. That doesn’t make every decision reasonable. It just means the person making those decisions was still learning, and I can acknowledge that without using it as a blanket excuse for everything.
What I’ve taken from all of this is a question I now try to ask before committing to something I’m unsure about: do I have actual reasons to believe this will work, or just reasons to want it to? It sounds simple, but from the inside those two things feel almost identical, and the gap between them is where most of my worst decisions have lived. I’m more cautious than I used to be. I’m more aware of the value of financial stability and professional boundaries, and I pay closer attention when someone’s behavior doesn’t line up with what they’re telling me. I’m not going to get this right every time. I’ll still misjudge situations, probably trust the wrong person again, and make a few choices that look a lot less intelligent in hindsight than they do right now. But I’d like to keep getting better at listening to myself when I have reservations, and at noticing when wanting something has started doing my thinking for me.
I can’t go back and make different choices at 23 or 25. I can’t recover the time I spent in relationships that weren’t right for me, undo professional mistakes, or spare myself the embarrassment of realizing I trusted the wrong people. But I can decide what to do with those experiences. I can stop treating each mistake as proof that I’m incapable of good judgment, and I can stop leaning on my age as an explanation for decisions I now recognize I could have handled differently. Maybe growing up isn’t becoming someone who never makes mistakes. Maybe it’s becoming someone who recognizes when she’s making one, understands why she’s making it, and is finally willing to do something about it.
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