Get me out of here!

I'm helplessly trapped inside my own head!

I suppose this sort of situation is prone to over-thinking. When you're at a crossroads, trying to decide what to do with your life, particularly just after realizing that you may have made one of the biggest, most expensive mistakes of your life to-date, you tend to want to analyze every move you make. And analyze some more. And then ask other people what they think. And then analyze that. You develop a paralyzing fear of decision-making, since your last go at decision-making didn't end so well. You lose trust in yourself. You worry that you'll repeat the same mistakes.

If you're me, all that angst translates to over-thinking every feeling, every urge, every leaning, every thought. I feel as though I've lost my sense of what's real, or what's right ...or something. I feel like I can't tell whether I'm being impulsive or genuinely following my heart and chasing my real, deeper desires. I feel like I have to second-guess myself whenever I think I want something. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but now I don't think I really ever wanted that. So, what if the things I think I want now turn out to be not-such-a-good-idea later?

I'm sure we all go through these periods of self-doubt. Lord knows I'm very familiar with it myself... I've just never been SO ANNOYED by it before. This time it's spreading like some kind of opportunistic infection. When I was doubting my decision to go to medical school, it really only affected my thoughts about medical school. Now that I've made the leap of admitting to myself that medical school may have been a mistake, the self-doubt is infiltrating every decision I (try to) make! I mean, I could probably pick out a pair of jeans or curtains or something, but any decision that carries the least bit of weight is becoming agonizing. I've always been indecisive about stupid stuff (like ice cream flavors, for example), but this is just crazy. And irritating.

But what's really getting to me isn't that I'm quickly losing the ability to make confident decisions - it's that I'm losing my sense of what I really want. I'm losing track of what I am sure of. I'm LOSING IT, people! I need a violent shove back into the reality of my life and who I am and what I'm about. I need to get out of my head!