Now, it’s just one part of my collection, and my desires have changed towards buying another one.

Carrying a cute bag, much like what I had seen all the cool older women do, was an ambition I naively fulfilled, not aware of what it could entail.

The first thing I was hit with was, “ Could you please keep my sunglasses in your bag?” by a friend.

I couldn’t help but say yes to the request. However, this became a common occurance, now the very fact that I wasn’t carrying a bag meant I had companions annoyed at me because they couldn’t have the convenience of going about the world carefree.

The blatant pattern was mostly men asking to keep their essentials in my bag.

The once-seen objective of the bag as an accessory was now a burden on my right shoulder, with the strap digging deeper into my skin with every new object added.

The once idolised accessory started looking like a soft conditioning tactic for women to be open to carrying others’ burdens with a smile on their face and a pep in their step.

The little leather pouchette had more expectations from others around it than it knew. It had to be prepared for any inconvenience, and well, it inadvertently teaches women the cost of being unprepared.

Not because every woman consciously chooses to, but because somewhere along the way, preparedness becomes a kind of femininity.

A good woman has what you need.

A thoughtful woman remembers.

A capable woman anticipates.

And a woman with a bag ( which she should always carry), apparently, has room to carry the world’s burden on her shoulder.

It’s funny how men have the opposite expectation; their pockets are functional enough to fit the 3 essentials. The weight of their existence, though, goes into the little leather pouchette of the woman around them, which she must accept graciously.

Maybe that's part of the lightness men get to move through the world with. Maybe that's where some of the audacity comes from.

It’s odd, but I like to carry my bags empty now.

In modern economics, this consumer would be considered irrational. However, this theory pretty much sums up the decisions of most of our lives.

I, for one, am a spectacular case study in the misuse of this theory.

I stay in some relationships longer than I should, leave ones that could have shown promise because of a lack of history and time, go down paths a version of me approved of when I was ten, refuse to quit things that I hate, and quit the things that excite me because they are comparatively new.

Much of my life has been spent trying to justify previous versions of myself. Every decision has felt strangely cumulative, as though admitting I no longer wanted something would erase all the work that went into wanting it in the first place.

Maybe that is the real danger of sunk costs. They convince us that consistency is always a virtue. That changing our minds is a form of failure. That every past version of ourselves deserves loyalty, even when they have long since stopped resembling the person we have become.

These small decisions I refuse to make to avoid discomfort compound exponentially, drifting me further away from myself. The web of small white lies I tell myself eventually leaves me living a life I never consciously chose.

Not because it is the life I want.

Not because it makes me happy.

But because it feels familiar.

And familiarity has always been easier to mistake for certainty than uncertainty has been to embrace.

The strange thing about self-imposed limitations is that they rarely feel limiting while they are being built. They feel sensible. Responsible, even. One compromise seems harmless. One delayed decision seems reasonable. One year spent waiting seems insignificant.

Until one day you realise that your life is no longer a product of conscious choices, but of choices you avoided making.

I suspect this is why the sunk cost fallacy is so difficult to overcome. It requires us to admit that the person who made the original decision may no longer exist. The ambitions change. The priorities change. The people we love change. We change.

Yet we continue to honour commitments made by versions of ourselves we have long outgrown.

So I often find myself wondering whether I have made my own bed, and whether, if I ignored it for long enough, it would eventually become comfortable.

Whether familiarity could masquerade as happiness, enough time spent lying in the wrong place could make it feel right, or if discomfort, left unattended, eventually softens into contentment.

I suspect this is the lie at the heart of every sunk cost.

That if we wait long enough, the thing we choose will become the thing we want.

That time itself can justify a decision.

That endurance is proof of correctness.

But an unmade bed does not become perfect because you continue sleeping in it.

You simply become accustomed to the creases.

I somehow think I was born performing, and this decade, the 20’s have been nothing but a start of a shitshow for I am actively trying to unlearn my tendency to revert to playing my poorly written part and my horrible stage presence. At every moment, I think the audience will boo me off the stage, but I persist with tears in my eyes, like an anxious masochist of sorts, getting constantly edged by the growing pit in my stomach.

The costumes, the performances, the masks, they all have had a way of keeping me going. For most of my life, I was actually decent, some would say even good. Each tear in the costume was casually looked over; the script never felt like a lie big enough to be questioned, and my bones didn’t feel heavy enough after every action.

The costumes, the performances, the masks no longer protect me. They suffocate me.

Only if I were skilled enough to laugh at the right jokes, stick to the script, deliver lies with poise and conviction, and properly follow the path prewritten for girls like me, maybe adjusting to adult life would be easier.

I try to take off one piece of the costume at a time, hopefully by the end of the decade, I will be behind the stage, directing the play, butt naked.