With Every Choice We Die a Million Deaths

05 May, 2025

I have a hard time making decisions. It doesn't matter how low the stakes. It doesn't matter how much it doesn't matter. I agonize over Every. Single. One.

I've tried pros and cons lists (which always end up cancelling each other out), flipping a coin (I even bought a fun one that says "Hell Yes" on one side and "Fuck No" on the other to try and amuse myself into using it more), phoning a friend (okay, metaphorically "phoning," given these days people react to an unplanned phone call like you've broken into their home and shat on their carpet and are now sitting in their bathrobe on their couch drinking their tea), et cetera.¹

But no method/tip/trick resolves the grinding cognitive gridlock or dials down the "the whole world hangs in the balance" intensity of decision-making.

Look, some decisions are actually not a big deal...but also (hear me out now) they are²

I know some decisions really are minor. That their weightiness is of my own creation. That I have imbued them with an oversized significance because of what they represent to me.

For example, I've been agonizing over how to organize the content³ I'm creating for this website. On the surface, it's hundreds of minor technical choices: whether to use posts vs pages for my art, whether and how to use tags, et cetera.⁴

In "reality," these are not life-or-death decisions. In "reality," there is no "right" or "wrong" here. But for me, the means of organizing anything is fraught with a lifetime of shame-inducing executive functioning struggles (oh, hello, undiagnosed Autism and ADHD!), a near-constant fear-state of chaotic cognitive and emotional overwhelm (oh, hi there, unsupported neurodivergence steeped in childhood trauma), and an inability to engage with anything at a "surface level" (oh, I didn't see you there, complex-thoughts-or-no-thoughts-for-you brain).

And all of this is amplified by the fact that I've imbued this website with the monumental significance of serving as a digital representation of my entire being (no pressure, website...).

So to me, it all feels...heavy.

But my neurodivergent-complex-thinker-trauma-affected-blah-blah-congrats-your-brain-is-so-special-blah-blah self aside, decisions really are heavy. Because every choice is the death of every other choice. It's the death of every other future. And it took my friend's husband's shockingly unexpected death—and her subsequent book recommendation—for me to realize how deeply I grieve many of these unrealized futures. How much, perhaps, we all do...

A love, a loss, a reconnection, a recommendation, a realization

I had only recently reconnected with my friend Lisa⁵ when her husband's health rapidly devolved from a suspected case of strep pneumonia to stage four lung cancer to his death in the span of a few months. Hugo died twenty-four days after they finally received their cancer diagnosis.

I'd been there to witness the start of Lisa and Hugo's love, when it was awkward and tender; they didn't speak the same language and sent letters through Google translate, literally and figuratively reaching across boundaries with their love.

And now, here I was, witnessing the depth of that love through the lens of his death and her grief. It was (and is) an honor and privilege to hold space for Lisa's grief—to sit with her in it and walk with her through it—best I can.⁶

At the time of Hugo's death, I was grieving a very different loss. And together, in our very different ways, for very different reasons, we explored the false boundaries of grief. How society places constrictions on "acceptable" grieving—that it should take a certain amount of time, look a certain way, be of a certain magnitude. It was during one of these exchanges that Lisa recommended the book As Long as You Need: Permission to Grieve by J. S. Park (followed by the caveat geared for me that "he is a chaplain but is not at all overbearing.").⁷

(For the record, he is, in fact, not at all overbearing.)

At every turn, every choice, we die a million deaths each day

In the very first chapter, Park delves into the concept of "future loss"—of grieving the futures that didn't happen. This was where my own grief was most heavily seated. But I’d yet to recognize it as grief. Because it wasn't rooted in the past.

In many ways, I had come to peace with what I’d lost. With what was over and done with and unchangeable. But grief is not isolated to the past. As Park writes:

"It’s true. We grieve the past. But mostly no one gets a chance to grieve the future. It doesn’t seem to read as a real loss.

I need to tell you about this because nobody told me: The dream that didn’t happen is as much of a loss as losing the one that did."

We can grieve an unrealized future. A buried dream. The infinite, unrealized paths fracturing off every single choice we've made.

With one sentence, Park pinpointed this much more deeply-seated source of my existential dread for decision-making. One rooted far beneath the executive functioning challenges and other factors I’d identified. One that explained what I was starting to realize was a profound sense of mourning:

"At every turn, every choice, we die a million deaths each day."

Yes, I had come to some peace with what I'd lost in the past. What I was struggling with (and continue to), is all the choices from here forward. Because every choice is the death of every other possibility. In deciding, I can't help but kill every other future.

Torn between timelines & bearing the agony of an untold story

So, how do I—or any of us—come to peace with the unrealized futures lost with every choice? Park's exploration of future loss as "buried stories" pulled a forgotten thread within me that I think holds promise:

“When you bury someone’s story...it gets lodged in the ribcage, it gets radioactive, it festers, it shouts to be heard. Grief is always a voice that needs to speak. If you suppress it, it still speaks—but not always in ways that are healthy. Not in the ways you need. It pushes through your skin like rogue splinters.

Burying a future loss without telling its story can make you sick. Timesick. You get split between timelines...and you clutch two timelines until you’re ripped in half."

So maybe the key here is telling the stories. Of bearing witness to all that could have been but never will be.

This was my impulse from as far back as I can remember—as a prolifically-journaling five-year-old, already furiously chronicling my interior life. It's an impulse that drove me to center my art practice and graduate work around the things we as a society deliberately keep hidden, shun, stigmatize, and distance ourselves from. The things we don't want to talk about.

Those are the very things I want to talk about. The very things I think many of us need to talk about.

For me—as I believe is the case for many artists and writers—creating is not just a drive but a necessity. It's like breathing.

In the last decade or so, I completely stifled my creative self. I stopped breathing. And with the cessation of creation, the weight of every choice became heavier and heavier. Perhaps precisely because I'd ceased making space for the stories untold.

“There is no agony like bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

So now, here, on this humble little website, I'm starting to breathe again...