Progress?

I have to admit I'm not making much progress towards becoming more decisive. I'm back in school after several years away. I dropped out of college in the first place, at least partly, because I couldn't decide on a major. At the time that was because nothing really appealed to me. Now I'm having the same problem, but this time it's because everything appeals to me.

I have a goal, sort of, at least I'm thinking about possibly going to medical school. That's progress for me, I have at least somewhat of an idea what I want to do when I'm done with school. However, since I need to finish my bachelors first I'm at a loss. I'd like to major in Communications, but then so would everyone else and I don't like that competition. Of course it would make sense to major in Biology, Chemistry or Bio-Chemistry since I plan on applying to med school when I'm done, but the University is going to start harassing me about why I haven't graduated yet if I do any of those simply because of the number of credits I'll have as I near completion. The advisor suggested that I "knock out" a Philosophy or Psychology major since I took a lot of credits in those two areas the first time I was in school and it would probably take the least amount of credits to do one of those and complete my med school pre-admission requirements.

As you can see it's quite a dilemma. I don't think I'm alone in finding this decision daunting. I'd like to be the kind of person who could just make this decision. Ideally I'd have such a well developed sense of self that it wouldn't even really be a decision, I'd just know what I'm supposed to do or what would be best or even what I'd like to do, but that's just not me. So in the end I let my registration priority and geography decide for me. By the time I was able to register I couldn't get into the Communications prerequisite classes. I have certain requirements I still have to take because they didn't exist when I first went to school. One is a 3 quarter foreign language requirement, so I had to take the second quarter of German. In order to not have back to back classes on opposites ends of campus I signed up for Biopsychology. So it looks like I'm going to end up a Psychology major by default. While I'm relieved to have that decision taken out of my hands in a way, it doesn't do much to appease my fear that I will die with my options open.

Introduction

I'm 26 years old and a friend of mine, near my age, recently told me of a comedy bit where the comedian described our generation by saying that the slogan for our generation would be "we died with our options open". It's not inaccurate, but it terrifies me maybe because it's so accurate. I'm no better than the rest of my fellow 20-somethings. Ask me to make a decision as simple as what to eat for dinner and I'm hopeless. Forget making major life decisions like when to get married and whom to get married to or what I want to be when I grow up. I hate this about myself. My inability to make decisions has haunted me. I know I'm not the only one. I look around at my friends and acquaintances and they're just as indecisive as I am. Perhaps that should be comforting but it's really not. I see a bunch of other people who aren't married even though they've been with the same person for years. I see people my age working at jobs instead of careers because they can't make up their minds about what they truly love doing. How do we break the cycle of indecision and actually commit to something or someone. How do we stop always asking ourselves is there something or someone better out there?

I've made a small step forward. When I'm making plans to go out to dinner with someone and they ask where I'd like to go, instead of passing "I don't know where do you want to go"s back and fourth for 20 minutes I say the first restaurant I think of and just go with it. I know it's not much of a breakthrough, but like I said it's a small step. I wonder if they have a 12-step program for indecisiveness?