Choices, Matthew. Choices.

As the end of my VSO placement hurtles towards me, I am more than a little daunted by the life choices which are staring me in the face.

The thing-that-was-in-between-me-and-being-a-grown-up-getting-on-with-the-rest-of-my-life, will soon be behind me, leaving me, supposedly, being a grown up and with both feet in the-rest-of-my-life.

The facts that we gave up our rented flat, gave away many of our belongings and don’t have jobs to go back to, don’t scare me. In fact, I loved the process of shedding the unnecessary baggage in our lives and I love the feeling of freedom in not being tied to any one particular option when we go back. But actually, now that I’ve come to think about what the next step should be, I’m overwhelmed by choice. It’s not natural. People generally end up living somewhere because that’s where their job or partner’s job takes them: they don’t sit staring at a map of the country (or even the world), wondering where they’d like to live.

Perhaps I’m just not imaginative enough. Perhaps I’m lacking The Dream which other people have to drive them on (or to bemoan as their lives take a different, parallel route). I genuinely don’t know where I want to go, or what I want from life. Where do I want to be in a few years’ time? Strutting, high-heeled, through Manhattan on my way to work, coffee in hand and cocktails to look forward to after work? Yes please. Making soup from my home-grown vegetables, pinny on and two rosy-cheeked toddlers at my feet? Sounds good. Drinking wine in an East London flat, stacks of paperbacks for furniture and several art galleries within walking distance? Why not?!

I can see myself in all of these scenarios and more, and I can imagine myself happy in them. Although, I can also imagine, in any one of those tableaux, a niggling thought: what would like have been like if…? I’m starting to see that this the-grass-is-always-greener tendency can be toxic: it either means you never allow yourself to be fully happy with the choices you’ve made, or you’re paralysed into stasis because you don’t want to take any path at the expense of closing off the roads not taken. But it’s not easy to snap out of it. Having so much control over what I do next (or try to do next) feels like a lot of responsibility.

Coda

As a result of having recently read Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, and a number of articles about women’s life choices popping up as a response to a recent UNICEF report, my mind is in a feminist space at the moment: please bear with me. I’m wondering whether the quandaries above have anything to do with gender. This constant debate about ‘Can women have it all?’, which rears its head in films, sitcoms, newspapers, celebrity magazines – is it really only a question which women have to ask themselves? What about men – do they find themselves with their boxers in a twist about which direction to take their life in? Sure, there’s the unavoidable fact that having a baby (if you’re going down the biological route) is more restrictive for the woman – for a start, I believe it’s pretty difficult to pick your keys up off the floor when you’re 8 months pregnant. But few careers would collapse as a result of having to take the few weeks off necessary to give birth and recover enough to be able to go back to the office. So, that process aside – why should these life choices be any different for men than women? Are men (or actually anyone other than me) angsting over whether they want to go for the cottage in the country or the swish city pad, the high-powered stay-late-in-the-office job or the part-time child-friendly option?

Perhaps, really, it comes to down to an ability in men to focus, single-mindedly on a particular goal, a particular kind of life; perhaps there’s something inherently female about weighing up the pros and cons of our choices endlessly, and worrying ceaselessly about how our choices will affect others. Maybe I just need to man up and get on with it.