So a few years ago, when I was finishing up my third year of serving in the army, I was confronted with making two decisions simultaneously that really took a toll on me. The first was having to decide whether to continue in my service and start looking for new positions, assessing the relevant ones for me and having to choose to commit to one for at least a year. The other decision was having to decide where to live because at the time my friends, my twin sister, and I were living on a kibbutz all together as a group; by then, it seemed that mostly everyone felt it was time to split and move out. I remember that when my sister told me she was preparing to leave and move to the city to find a new place, I got super angry with her, to the point where I felt like I physically wanted to just explode from the stress this was causing me, as if she was making me make this huge decision. She knew that her leaving would affect my wanting to stay, which is what caused my initial fear, and to be honest, deep down I knew I was ready to leave. But the kibbutz became a safe space for me, and moving to a new city was full of unknowns and unknowns of any decision I make can paralyze me completely. I didn’t even know where to move to and with who, there were too many possibilities in front of me all at once. What I know well about myself, having experienced years of decision difficulty, is that I can’t trust myself enough in making decisions, so I usually look to friends or family and ask for their guidance and wait for them to just choose something for me. What ended up happening was that I was only able to make one of the two decisions on my own, because making the other was simply too much to choose at once. I decided to be discharged from the army after finishing my last job, but everything that had to do with moving out I left for my sister to make, where I just cruised on auto and kind of let her do whatever she chose, tagging along neutrally. It was so much easier to accept things as they were even if they were chosen by someone else, rather than having to deal with making them and living with the consequences of my choices later on. I think that the time limit of these decisions was also a factor in the stress, but in this case it actually helped push me to actually decide something; a deadline can shorten the time I spend on all the calculating and questioning of my options, which can take days, weeks, or sometimes months right up until the very last minute when an answer is expected of me. I also remember that this state of indecision and intense anxiety affected so many of the people around me, like I found myself not concentrating while at work, not having fun with friends when we went out, and just constantly turning the options and scenarios in my head non-stop, blocking off any other function my brain could do at the time except for weighing out a final decision. And I even remember that this affected me so much to the point that I wasn’t mentally available to continue dating someone I had been seeing, and this was someone that I was really into… up until today I really feel that I missed out on a great opportunity, so all I can think of now that rises up is the regret of “what could have been” if I wasn’t so busy obsessing over those decisions.