Personal reflection and self-assessment

Decision Making

I recently changed addresses, and this move was spurred probably more by emotional than anything else. I was motivated by the need to establish a sense of permanence and build a base for myself. The need for stability was in part pragmatic, but it was also emotional as well. The human psyche typically likes to feel a certain sense of stability and that was something I was lacking. So I went from being in a chronically unstable position to one with a more established, permanent domestic situation. So emotion was the key underlying factor for me, driving my emotion.

There was definitely some internal conflict about this decision. I had to some extent been quite happy with my previous circumstances, unsettled though they were. Freedom can be quite a powerful feeling, and I had just a little bit of that. But, over time, the need for something more concrete and meaningful, getting to be in a place I could see myself spending years, that was a more powerful feeling. This just reflects a transition for me in terms of switching gears a little bit, but the entire decision was made with respect to how I would feel about my new situation vs. how I felt about my prior situation.

Resolving this issue was not that hard to resolve really. I think there were two steps to resolving this issue. The first step was that I needed to know on an emotional level that this was the right thing to do. So I had a sense that it was, but needed confirmation of that. I went looking for a place to live, and when I found the one I knew was right, I went for it. There is a part of me that was willing to argue that had I not found the right place, I might have continued on with my unstable existence, but I'm not so sure of that. I think perhaps I knew deep down that I needed to find a place to hang my hat, and that when something decent came up I would probably go for it. Thus, I went looking, found a good place and that was it.

The decision-making process probably had more subtlety than I am giving credit for. Ultimately, I realized that it was quite important for me to just make a decision. That was probably the hardest part, and took a couple of months, just getting to the point where I was ready to make a decision at all -- deciding to decide was the biggest choice in this situation.

Formulating options was pretty easy, because I saw this entire situation as an either/or, though there was the part of about finding an apartment. With that, however, I mostly used by gut emotional instincts. I could have approached that problem from a rational perspective, but I realized that I didn't really want to -- I just wanted a solution and was going to take the first reasonable solution that presented itself. This is pretty far from rational decision-making, but it is exactly the type of logical shorthand that most people engage in.