No one talks about how lonely it is to be a people pleaser

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Decision-making implies sacrifice. Yin or yang. Never all. Never nothing.

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I had just splurged on a floor-length, woven sweater. A magical coat. A Willy Wonka coat. Cherry pink, sunburst yellow, Jolly Rancher blue were the colors of this coat.

It was the first day of June and I was bumbling down the road in Eastern Australia, when, the face of a girl I recognized flashed by. It looked a whole lot like Anna’s.

Anna is cool, she always has been. But it had been nearly a decade since our high school graduation in California, when I last saw her, 7,000 miles away.

Stop motion-style, we caught each other’s gaze for a second, but carried on a few more steps.

It couldn’t be —

My head turned before my mind let it. Hers did too. We looked back at each other and locked eyes. Then she mouthed, “Miranda?”

Synchronicities are confirmations that you’re exactly where you need to be.

(A very wise 18-year-old told me this in the pouring rain the next day, after I recounted the encounter.)

It felt like “The Parent Trap,” when the two little Lindsey Lohans meet each other for the first time. Handfuls of years apart didn’t matter; Anna just got me the way hometown folks do.

We immediately tore into the belly of the cinnamon roll, conversationally, relating over our recurring nightmares about our high school... along with happy chats about her pursuits as a lifeguard, firefighter, and soon, student of Chinese medicine.

I gained a friend after that spontaneous encounter, all because of a snap judgment. All because I honored instinct. All because of a double-take.

Welcome back to my decision-making anthology. Here, I bring you the art of flow and receiving.

This essay is about what to do after a decision has been made. It looks at regret, and how to defeat it. It looks at softening. It looks at surfing the aftermath.

“Instead of trying to make the right decision, make the decision right” is what Dr. Ellen Langer, the Harvard professor and mind-body psychologist, prescribes.

Revered as the “Mother of Positive Psychology,” Langer encourages shifting the focus of decision-making away from the outcome. Having asked some of her students to say yes to all requests for one week, and other students to make decisions arbitrarily, like by flipping a coin, she found that students’ well-being increased as they focused more on the present.

The fear of missing out (FOMO) is a feeling native to this you only live once (YOLO)/social media generation, and is precisely what Dr. Langer wants you to beat through mindfulness. That’s a good strategy for sure, but I have another that is worth a try.

Narcissism. I’m talking just a couple of healthy doses of it, just to quell FOMO. Hear me out.

What if only you exist? Competition suddenly becomes silly because your understanding of what others have or don’t is an illusion. Would you lust for more when all you have is all there ever was, is, and could have been?

Think about how the sun follows you as you move along the horizon. So does your reflection on water. Maybe the sun isn’t the center of the universe? Maybe you are?

We can’t be sure that any other realities are indeed real. Yes, dissociation and self-obsession can be dangerous and misanthropic, but just a little in this context, I’d wager, is a helpful tool to achieve inner peace.

Once you make a choice, stand by it. It’s your reality. The alternative was never a real option, and isn’t your present, so there’s no use in indulging what-ifs. Backtracking comes with costs that likely outweigh the afterthought benefits of the other option. Moreover, the alternative just doesn’t make sense.

To replace FOMO with more flow, or to “flow-mo,” consider Carl Dennis’ poem “The God Who Loves You.” In it, he riddles off many different life choices, and asks if those alternatives could’ve added up to “a life thirty points above the life you’re living”?

And so I’ll ask, is thirty points worth the pain of hesitation?

One manifestation of regret we commonly see is the concept of “the one that got away.” I can’t stand that expression. First, it’s grammatically incorrect; It should be “the one WHO got away.” Second, anything not in the picture now was never meant to stick around. It’s no one’s fault; There was never a true alternative to start.

Joshua Rothman unpacks this gorgeously in his essay in The New Yorker from the depths of the pandemic. “The idea that I, myself, could also be someone else seems to exploit a loophole in language,” he wrote. “We want the world to be more porous and lambent than it is.”

This obsession with “what if” is a problem of the present day. People used to live the life their parents had, or that society had prewritten for them. Rothman adds that the work of being a modern person involves “dreaming of alternate lives in which you don’t have to dream of alternate lives. We long to stop longing, but we also wring purpose from that desire.”

Is it really that you wish you had gone with the other option, or that fantasizing about it is your sadistic pleasure?

Melissa Etheridge’s sperm donor story reminds us of why we should focus on reality.

She and her partner considered two donor options: David Crosby or Brad Pitt. They chose Crosby. Her teenagers now say they “could’ve been amazingly handsome,” had their parents just picked Pitt. But if that were the case, her kids would’ve been someone else entirely.

Like with the fig analogy I offered at the end of the intro essay, the source of hesitation is fear of regret, of imperfection. Striving for infallibility can drain the joy of the process, however. The best thing you can do is to do something. Setting a deadline can help.

And from there, you can make adjustments. Tinker until things feel right. Course correcting a bit can be more efficient than overanalyzing the initial decision.

Your challenge for the day is to order an item on a menu exactly as is. Make peace with it. Relish it. Make it work for you. (And if you need to order some sauce on the side after the fact to make it taste a little better, so be it. The other plate wouldn’t have been all that different.)

The Zen parable about Master Hakuin Ekaku is a good model for acceptance.

Once upon a time, a beautiful Japanese girl discovered she was pregnant, which made her parents angry. When they demanded to know the father, she said it was Master Hakuin. Furious, the parents hounded the master, to which he replied: “Is that so?”

The newborn child was brought to Hakuin, who had lost his reputation of honor. He didn’t mind and took good care of the child.

One year later, the girl told her parents the truth; Hakuin was not the father.

The parents of the girl immediately begged for forgiveness from Hakuin, and to get the baby back. Hakuin conceded. He handed over the baby and kindly responded: “Is that so?”

It’s easy to internalize great pressure when confronted with a choice. But doing so implies a grand sense of self-importance — the illusion that you’re a playmaker, or something. What if your decisions didn’t matter so much? What if your destiny is pre-marked like big dots on a timeline? What if the big fixtures of your life are decided already?

Making a decision right looks like making the most out of the situation you’re in. A friend who grew up poor in rural Colorado told me that he chose to pursue a career in civil engineering because it would earn him good money. While he didn’t immediately feel stimulated by civil engineering, he grew to enjoy the subject because actively resenting it would’ve hurt far more.

We see this confirmed through findings like from a marriage happiness study in 2019. Marriage proposals are arguably one of the most important decisions a human could make. And yet, researchers Sheetal Yadav and S.K. Srivastava observed that there was no significant difference in happiness between couples who married for love versus by arrangement.

As living, breathing creatures, we have the power to adapt and make lemonade out of the circumstances with which we’re presented. And at the end of the day, we forget about most of the decisions we make anyway.

A year and a half ago, I dedicated 10 minutes of my life in the Brazilian Amazon to weighing whether I should buy a white beaded necklace or a teal beaded necklace. The white necklace would go with more outfits, but it was a bit shorter, so I couldn’t wrap it around twice, so it was less cute. The teal necklace was gorgeous, and the right length, but more of a statement piece, so maybe less wearable and worth the money. My brain flitted back and forth, white-blue-white-blue-white-blue.

I bought blue.

Had I bought the white necklace, would my life have been substantially different? Maybe. Maybe the white necklace was cursed; Maybe it was blessed. Maybe an employer would have stopped me on the street to compliment the necklace and offered me my dream job right there. Maybe my soulmate would have sought me out of a crowd to show me the same necklace on his chest. Considering all that could be is fun and whimsical and a waste of time. I went blue. Blue is all that ever could’ve been.

And now, a year and a half later, I’ve forgotten about the damn necklace anyway. It’s hanging in my closet 7,000 miles away. So, good thing it’s blue — I guess.

If you want to see my brain clank and sputter, hand me a menu.

The cashier is glaring.

It’s been somewhere between seven seconds and four years. I’m not really sure. I hate wasting other people’s time, and my own for that matter, but I hate nothing more than making a bad decision.

Most people feel this way, I think. Most people really care to make good dec…

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Nothing’ll strum your serotonin

Buzz your butterflies

Drizzle your panties

Like when he cleans his room for you.

By then you’ve memorized the main fixtures of the place:

That print he inherited from his mom,

of a Thai-Hindu temple

which means nothing to him.

The stacked surfboards, east-facing.

The off-white curtains, adorned with technicolor tassels

(also, his m…

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Two multilinguals walk into a bar. The figurative arm wrestle mounts over which language to speak, and a medley of variables decides the winner. What’s the dominant language of the place? Who’s more fluent in the other language? What’s the subject matter?

Like trying to inse…

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Sitting too close to too many strangers for too many hours, breathing in the same recycled air, virtually unable to move. That’s flying Economy. It’s humiliation, it’s confinement, it’s torture, in its rawest form. But I met a freak on a secluded beach who loves it and now I do too.

Two miles from any road, where hairy, green grass bites at silken sand, …

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LA, to me, has always felt like a laminated city, plastic-coated and permanent. Untouchable. Unchanging. Unageing. Seasons turn and palm trees won’t even sway. A city with a climate of a soundstage.

Los Angeles people can seem like paper dolls, with carefully cut bodies and drawn-on faces, two-dimensional, and at times, soulless.

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