Preparation Against What Ifs

Addario used the anecdote about her Nana’s missed chance at love to explain the relationship she has with her job as a war correspondent. If she hadn’t pursued it, she would have ended up regretting it and wondering what would happen if she had chosen it.

However, unlike Addario, I’m not as decisive and often choose comfort over change, leading to me wondering all the what ifs afterward. A situation that frames this well is my cousin Felicia’s but also mine.

Whenever I talk to my cousin, I can’t help but think of how complicated her life is. Aside from my brother who’s twenty-five, there’s no one else around her age, and as a twenty-seven year old with a daughter, there’s a lot on her plate. The person she’s dating also has a child around her daughter’s age which I’m sure alleviates some of that pressure. At one point, they lived together but broke things off for a while. Now, they’re back together again but Felicia lives back home with my aunt instead.

While I don’t always know what’s going on with her, if I could venture to guess one of the things that concern her at the moment, it’d be that she was lonely. This is something I sympathize with because I’ve been in a similar situation.

When I was younger, I would hope for a friend that would stay up late talking with me and that I could share my problems with. I finally met someone like that in high school. There was a moment when my relationship with them reached an unhealthy break, and my friends advised me to break things off. However, instead, I hesitated and hoped for things to change and get better on their own.

I didn’t want to leave them because they were the closest person I had. And when the usual family gossip circulated, I learned that Felicia felt that way too. She told her mom that she was afraid no one would love her again. So she stayed. And I did too.

I’m fully aware of the lack of confidence behind this decision. That things would never be the same, that I’d have to wait for someone new and start all over again. Even though things are much better on my end, I wonder if I made the right choice every so often.

Decisiveness and confidence are two attributes that take time and trial and error to achieve. However, the lesson I want to take from this and want to share with you, the reader, is to not be afraid of change. The best ingredient for fear is resolve. Your instinct is the first step, your decision the next, and your resolve the final. My hope is that my passion blog can give courage to people in situations like these where they’re afraid of making a change, whether it’s small or large. I want to be able to tell them what I wish I knew.

That nothing’s ever impossible if you prepare yourself for it.

One thought on “Preparation Against What Ifs

  1. I completely agree with the idea that Addario writes about her Nana’s love life in order to convey how much her own passion means to her. Your story about your cousin and your high school relationship describes a more realistic dilemma between passion and the safe road out. While it seems like an easy decision to make to those outside of the situation, like your high school friends, the belief that you’ll never have something like a person who fully understands you again twists into your head and you’re more likely to wait out the situation then get out of it. This is such a ubiquitous dilemma and more often than not, these situation aren’t clear in what option to pick, especially when you don’t have Addario’s passion for her job. Your breakdown of accepting change really speaks volumes in its simplicity yet the breakdown really works when you’re going through change! Finally, I was wondering whether you are going to tell stories about your experiences in your passion blog or how exactly you’re going to encourage people to adapt to change.

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