Video · The Ash Files
Would I choose this again?
Original title: “your life won't change itself.”
A key whose lock you can't identify goes back in the drawer. A pair of pants you never liked moves house with you three times. What else are you renewing automatically?
From
If it's still in my life, I must still want it.
To
Most of it simply never got asked to leave — so ask, would I choose this again, now?
“Adulthood has very poor chapter breaks.”— The Ash Files
The story
A key in a drawer whose lock you cannot identify, and may not live in the same country as. You put it back.
Buying a new notebook is deeply optimistic. The person buying it has plans; her handwriting will stay the same size. It lasts about 11 days.
When you're young, the chapter breaks are handed to you — new timetable, new teachers, shoes that pinch at the heel — and everyone agrees when one chapter has ended.
But adulthood announces nothing. Tuesday becomes Wednesday, and somehow you've used the same dry cleaner for nine years while actively disliking them. Things begin, and then they simply continue, largely because nobody remembered to stop them.
Therefore the drawer fills up, and so does the rest of life: habits, obligations, friendships, opinions, ways of spending Sunday. Some were chosen carefully. Others came in through a side door and stayed.
She has moved a pair of trousers she doesn't like through three homes, trying them on at every clear-out and putting them back, because time makes familiarity feel like meaning.
And the same thing happens with the expensive items. Goals belonging to a woman she barely remembers being — who may have written them while she still had braces — and who apparently still gets status updates.
So she reaches for the usual fix, "what do you want?", but that question assumes a pristine answer waiting behind a curtain with a clipboard, and most days there isn't one.
Therefore a smaller question: would I choose this again? Not forever. Now.
Sometimes the answer is an unqualified yes, and that deserves more attention than it gets — choosing something a second time, with the fantasy gone and February already lived through, is its own kind of love.
But the hard cases are the ones that are fine. No incident, no receipts, nothing to point at. Just four years of "I really should get back to that", which is the only signal you're going to get.
And you don't need a birthday or a January to notice. You can interrupt yourself — because almost nothing in the drawer was chosen twice. It simply never got asked to leave.
Beliefs that shift
- Still in my life means still wanted.Still in my life usually means never reconsidered.
- You'll know when something is over.Nothing announces it — the absence of any signal is the signal.
- Leaving needs a reason other people accept.Leaving needs one reason: you wouldn't choose it again.
What we learn
- We decide once and continue forever. Everyone talks about making decisions. Nobody talks about continuing them.
- The hard cases are the ones that are fine. No incident, no receipts, nothing to point to — so they survive by default.
- Yes is a real answer. The second time you choose something you know what it's like in February, and in the rain. Still yes is worth noticing.
- Knowing sooner wasn't available. It would have required being who you are now before the experiences that made you this person.
- Beginnings work because they interrupt. The empty notebook, the new apartment, the zipped suitcase: they make you look.
- You can interrupt yourself. No birthday, breakup, Monday or January required — and no equipment either.
Open questions
- Which of our current commitments would we not choose again today — and what's stopping us from asking out loud?
- Where does this stop applying? Care, promises and debts should survive a bad Wednesday. Where is the line between re-choosing and flakiness?
- Does a scheduled re-choosing ritual stay honest, or does it become a rubber stamp?