The well-traveled road

Do you ever get the feeling that every choice you make has been the wrong one, that even when you think you're going in the right direction, you take the fork in the road that leads you right back down to where you started?

I feel like that. All of the time.

There's nothing in my childhood to really point to a preponderance for bad decision-making. At least I don't think there is. I spent most of my time playing with Barbies and designing clothes for them and reading from an old set of encyclopedias at my grandma's house.

And watching old movies. I loved old movies.

I can't say that every decision I made was a bad decision. There are plenty of good decisions in my life. For example, my decision to try out for a play in high school led me to a larger group of friends and more confidence than my shy little self could handle. That confidence even trickled over into participating in an internship in our state capital when I was a senior in high school.

But that's where the good decisions seem to stop. Instead of figuring out how to pay for college, I opted to hide away in my house, scared to make the next move. My days and nights bled into long hours sleeping, all in an effort to avoid the mistake-filled future I could see coming.

After I opened my eyes to that possibility, my decisions led me down a noisy road. I made good decisions -- getting a job and moving out on my own at 18 -- but those choices became tempered by the many, many more bad choices that seemed right at the time. It took me six years to decide what I wanted to do with my life, and that decision only came after becoming a single parent at age 24. And THAT predicament only came from navigating the choppy waters of sexual and emotional relationships with prior experience equivalent to a canoe cobbled together from books, newspapers and craft glue. I was one hot mess back then.

The next few years seemed to turn my good-to-bad decision ratio into my favor.

I :

• went back to school (good),
• learned the joys of the internet (bad),
• found friends online (good)
• found a job in retail (good and bad)
• and used my associates' degree to propel me northward (good, kind of).

But then that led me to:

• my first apartment up north (bad),
• a trial run as an escort (so, so bad)
• a temporary stay for my daughter at my parents' house (bad),
• an affair with a Dutchman (kind of good),
• a series of bad decisions that screwed that affair up (so bad),
• an exit from school before I had completed my degree (very, very bad),
• a new apartment where my daughter and I could both stay (good),
• bats, cold water and a lecherous landlord (bad),
• a decent job in a large corporation (good),
• another new apartment, this time with an ex-convict cop as a landlord (eh, it was okay), and
• a network of real-life friends who were just as supportive as the ones I found online (very good).

Then my now-husband came into my life. Most every decision made since that point has been questionable, at best. I could find some good choices in there, but most of them have led down the well-worn path of folly.

I would like to say that I have learned something in this process, but the only conclusion I can make is that I am terrible at making decisions.