At some point in 2024–probably in April, probably on a Thursday—I’ll receive a message via Remind. This message will boil down to I can’t decide between College X and College Y, and I don’t know what to do. I predict this will happen because it’s happened all three years in which I’ve run Therapy Thursday in its present form, but I also predict this will happen because that decision is so central to the high-achieving senior’s stretch run during high school.
Like Thanos, their indecision is inevitable. After all, the students I’ll be teaching then will have waited all year for clarity to emerge about their futures. Persephone, risen with the season, will misconstrue her mission and deliver several doors instead. My students must still choose one to walk through. Nothing’s clear until they do.
This particular question is one I have a set approach for responding to these days because navigating it can be tricky. Although every asker isn’t tasking me with choosing for them, I get the sense that some actually might be outsourcing the decision-making process. Afraid that a “wrong” choice will echo forward for eternity, they proactively seek a scapegoat to curse on those future-days of ruing selections of UC Irvine over UC Santa Barbara. Deciding for oneself requires inward accountability if things go awry; far easier is blaming that teacher in high school for advising them poorly. Redirecting culpability is an airborne pathogen weaponized every day.
Resisting that question’s pull to inform any decision, I’ve begun incorporating a suggestion I got from multiple former students. It’s an approach that hijacks the very choice outsourcing that lurks in that innocuous query. That is, I suggest they flip a coin. Leave it all up to chance. Let the leprechauns be the perpetual punching bags for responsibility down the road. Blame Lady Luck if things backfire. She can take the heat.
Suggesting such a thing as a coin flip inevitably produces scattered snickers and eye rolls. Fair: I did the same when it was first suggested to me many years ago. But that isn’t the full story. There’s legitimate merit to this genus of decision tree.
If a person truly can’t decide between two wholly equitable options, then the coin flip provides resolution. It becomes like sports standings: eventually, if two teams really do match through the eighth tiebreaker, then random chance becomes as fair a method as any for separating them. The same is true here: if nothing distinguishes these schools enough to motivate a choice, then consider them interchangeable. Let some increasingly irrelevant metal money be useful for a minute.
If a person can decide but just freezes up when facing the crunch of commitment, then the coin flip also abides. During the interval when the coin rotates in the air, there arrives a moment of clarity. The choice will be made soon enough; the decision is out of the flipper’s hands because that coin already is. But while waiting for gravity and dynamic rotational forces to do their thing on that silver circle, one naturally does a quick inventory. Which side do they want the coin to land on? Which university is it that they’re hoping fortune deigns as fertile soil for growing the rest of their life? If one’s mind is truly blank, cool—fate can decide for them. But if one’s mind isn’t blank, then, hey: catch the coin, but don’t bother looking. Go where you discovered you want to go.
The logistics of executing this maneuver present challenges, of course. So many of us engage in such rich self-deception that knowing the mechanism behind the approach threatens its viability. If one enters the coin flip without formally granting it their Power of Attorney to choose—that is, if the stakes are inauthentic—then that reflection’s value weakens. The indecisive flippers need “This coin will pick my future for me” stakes in order for their control-starved psyches to illuminate the truth stuffed hastily into shadow-cloaked corners.
This is all a long way of noting that moments of treachery, while terrifying, do offer unique opportunities. High-stakes trials teach us about ourselves. It’s the old comedic trope about characters stuck in elevators eventually exchanging confessions about their truest desires. The claustrophobic fear that this might be the end frees the brain, dislodging some block that otherwise dampens our future-looking. When fate robs us of agency while our coins tumble back toward waiting hands, then, at last, we gain access to a state of clarity.
It’s only when we forfeit control that we can know what we’d do if we actually had it.
*****
I am not a hypochondriac. Several genuine articles exist in my orbit; my profile does not match their own.
It’s difficult to avoid following their logic, though. How often do we read a story about some terrifying tumor or lurking lesion lying in fatal wait only to be discovered out of nowhere? It wasn’t even three years ago when the Brooklyn Nets traded guard Caris LeVert to the Indians Pacers, only for the promising fifth-year player’s physical to reveal a renal carcinoma. Had LeVert stayed a Net, this probably gets found…but how many weeks or months later? That ludicrous four-team trade that eats up an entire phone screen in the browser gifted LeVert his greatest odds for recovery. He’s in remission now and playing a key role off the Cavaliers’ bench.
We don’t all get swapped for James Harden; some of us need to monitor our own bodies to stay ahead of the terrifying things our rogue anatomies are capable of. When something health-wise changes, the hypochondriac hogs WebMD’s bandwidth, clicking through conditions, which is ridiculous, but also, can you blame them? If a young professional athlete like Caris LeVert can hoop for the Nets while undetected cancer cells feast, all of us are vulnerable. We have to engineer our own early detection because no one is offering Rodion Kurucs and draft picks to secure interest in our health. A little bit of hypochondria is a healthy thing. We should all strive for their self-awareness and willingness to lay down copays to make sure that strange mole or creaking hip aren’t harbingers of something worse. Because sometimes they are.
But, as the hypochondriac refuses to admit, sometimes they are not. Three games into my freshman year of baseball, I was batting cleanup, calling out plays from first base, and diagnosed with a severe Salter-Harris fracture in my wrist. It was right there on the x-ray; I’d be cast up to my elbow, canceling my final season before it could even really begin.
The diagnosing doc never sent the x-ray to the orthopedist, though. He had to snap shots himself on-site, which delivered the biggest surprise of all: no fracture whatsoever. I was suffering from tendinitis. The original physician had misdiagnosed me in the most egregious way. I was given a thin sleeve; I weaseled my way into Saturday’s lineup for a pair of at-bats.
I bring this up because those three days between original diagnosis and correct diagnosis enlightened me. Playing baseball that season had been an afterthought. Far more interested in coaching, I had skipped tryouts altogether and grumbled about attending my team’s first practice on my fifteenth birthday. Ask that ninth grader about his excitement over playing baseball, and you’d have gotten an apathetic shrug. Agreeing to stick out the season didn’t mean I was going to like it.
When I was told my season was over by a shitty-eyed MD, I felt crushed. Yes, my wrist was sore, but I had wanted medication or orders to ice. The previous game had finished on a high: Coach Dave shouting out my leadership. I hadn’t even been trying to lead; I’d just been so into the game that I couldn’t help but get fired up. The thought of seeing that feeling snuffed out so suddenly left me sobbing in my bedroom when we arrived home. I hadn’t thought that playing in the teal jerseys of Carlton Engineering mattered to me, but faced with losing it, the contents of my heart surfaced. I desperately wanted to play.
All told, though, even if my wrist had featured a Salter-Harris fracture, the stakes were fairly low. Don’t make me imagine how differently my young adult life goes without that formative year of baseball experience, but ultimately, I wasn’t dying. It would have sucked to be in a cast up to my elbow for months, but it wasn’t going to end my world.
Not every health episode lines up that way.
I was at my second AVID Summer Institute in 2012 when I discovered a lump in a treacherous spot of my body. This wasn’t an area that I knew every nook and cranny of…but I knew this was abnormal immediately. A sweaty, cold set into my entire being; I could think of nothing else during the final hour of our workshop. I shook talking to my dad about it that night; I had to lean my head against the wall in the convention center lobby the next morning when I called the doctor’s office during regular business hours. Any doubt about the potential severity vanished when the receptionist’s voice softened after I awkwardly explained why I was calling.
“I’m so sorry,” she said with practiced grace. “We’ll get you in right away.”
There were four days between that call and my appointment. I didn’t know during those four days that they would find nothing cancerous; the grave tone of every person I talked to about the situation convinced me that I was facing the worst-case scenario. Whereas the hypochondriac races through present symptoms in search of answers, all I could think about was what would come next. If this was what every person assumed it was, then this might actually be the beginning of the end. Every single thing I had planned was suddenly in jeopardy. Would I see my AVID class graduate? Would I make it to the baseball season to coach Michael and Tony? If the doctor said I had, say, six months, what would I do with that time?
These are ridiculous questions, I know, but I can’t believe I’m the only person who would think that way. Such reasoning is part of the calculus of being alive: how would we invest our final hours? What matters enough to carry us to the end?
I was fortunate to have only four days to contemplate my early expiration date before an ultrasound cleared me, but others are not so fortunate. Among the most terrifying aspects of living are the ruthless, indiscriminate assassins that are rogue cells. Atomic corruption threatens all of us, from burgeoning wing scorers to balding third-year teachers. Even when a professional says, “Keep an eye on it” rather than “Christmas, hopefully” none of us are truly out of the woods.
There’s a part of us—deep down for some, splashing on the surface for others—that knows every bloodwork could lead to an urgent “Call me back immediately” voicemail from an MD near you. Lingering in that space of mortality awareness isn’t healthy, but what is the estate-planning industry if not a nod to the terror of our physical fragility? Shit: I’m about to flip on the next episode of The Summer I Turned Pretty’s second season, and, well: there’s no escaping these questions. I could savor Hank Green being in remission, but living offers a daily reminder of how temporary our little existences actually are.
My testicle might have ultimately been healthy in 2012, but the questions those four days of waiting raised have never left my mind. They’re those background processes on Windows that sometimes gnash on the CPU but can never be paused or deleted. A dialog box always rejects dismissal, proclaiming their operations too vital to interrupt, and what is that, if not a perfect description of my endgame thoughts? Some days, those thoughts overheat my machine, and I lack the expensive coolant system and row of fans to keep my temperature under control. The only way forward on those days when my own mortality stalks me like Puss in Boots’ wolf in The Last Wish is if I shut down all the other programs and let endgame.dll run for a while.
Like movie theaters in 2019, sometimes I just surrender myself to the juggernaut that is endgame.
Sometimes, it plays on every screen.
*****
There’s no coin involved, but those simulated stakes are easy enough for me to generate. What would I do if I was given six months to live? And what, of course, does that say about what’s really important to me?
I used to imagine I would go right on working. In some versions, I would be upfront about what was happening, demonstrating this poignant grace that would settle into the minds of the people around me. I’d recontextualize their understanding of what matters and their answer to what it means to be alive. In others, I would keep it all a secret, minimizing disruptions and hiding everything that I could for as long as I could. The effect would be similar, but I imagine more potent: there’s something in the way a sudden plot twist recolors everything that came before. Old moments suddenly gain new poignancy. I’d be a literary analysis thirst trap, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest muse, my every word during that clandestine period of disguised decay suddenly rich with somber poetry.
That plan faded during the pandemic. The more I thought about my instinct toward the status quo, the more I bristled at the thought of living-while-dying as an instrument, a tool, for others. Certainly, I imagine I would go for as long as I could, but I would absolutely stop well ahead of my cutoff point. With no health left to preserve, I’d indulge in eating what I want and try to spend time with the important people. There’d be a performative element to this—I’d be etching final memories into the soft woods of past-due relationships, making preemptive scars on soon-grieving hearts—but that would narrow my focus a bit. Instead of seeing the end as a tool to benefit many, I would ensure it specifically reached that target audience seated in the deepest depths of my soul.
But mostly, I would just write. I thrive in finite windows; something shifts each time I go all-in for NaNoWriMo that makes completing massive novels possible. What is a fatal diagnosis if not the firmest of deadlines? I wouldn’t have to stress about my barking shoulder or strained wrist; their utility would cease too soon to worry over their preservation. I know what I’d write, too, by the way; I’ve known for some time. But I’m not going to explore that now. You’d find out eventually, though—if everything went according to plan during the time that no one wants to plan for, that is.
Truthfully, though, there’s a futility to even thinking like this. Drawn-out deaths are a morbid, miserable luxury few of us will ever need to script out. The wolf in Last Wish doesn’t invite Puss to accept a calendar invite for a multi-week extravaganza; he just shows up at the bar one night, his teeth and knives gleaming in the candlelight. A slow, contemplative journey through melancholy isn’t reality; it’s more often Belly and the boys returning to an empty beach house that radiated life hours earlier. It’s sudden, and it’s shocking; it’s a phone call that draws blood and rips the ordered world in half.
How naïve must I be to imagine my end as some summery stroll to the horizon? It oozes denial; these thoughts reek of the noxious copium of nine-too-many vanilla-scented plug-ins blanketing, but never ever erasing, something foul just beneath. This emotional estate planning grants me no additional security—just a deranged synthetic pleasure in assorted grays. My wolf could be anywhere! He could be waiting in the passenger seat right now, ready to stash some furniture in permanent storage as I back out of my garage.
But whenever and wherever caninus terminus lies in wait for me is irrelevant because thoughts of my endgame are even more relentless than he is. It’s not just malignant cell clusters out to get me: every drive to school, every walk in the park, and every meal at home might mark my match point. Nothing guarantees slipping under the covers early will lead to blinking eyes five hours later. The only effective endgame protocol is to run the program constantly; it’s all day, every day. CPU health be damned.
Which means every parting has to be savored because it might be the last one. This sounds cliché and sentimental, bordering on saccharine, but it’s simply my acceptance of rugged realism. Those nights when I linger in the doorway and wait for your car to disappear around the bend, those games when I’m slow to rise from a plastic stadium seat while captivated by the starry sky rising above section 300, those conversations that are shared over cardboard cups of melted frozen yogurt with so many toppings that the store makes off like bandits—these aren’t accidents. These are my just-in-cases and my one-for-the-roads. These are moments of acceptance that this, like every moment before it and every fragile second yet to come, might tragically be the last such one.
I hope you notice those flickers of time. I hope you wonder what’s so captured my attention for those few fleeting seconds. And I hope you remember me in those ephemeral moments when the time around me suddenly stands still because it shows without telling that I’m savoring my final breaths.
That isn’t the ending I’d script if I knew the wolf’s itinerary, of course. But the wolf might have a Menchie’s rewards card, too, so I play it safe and hope my subtext sticks. Just in case it doesn’t, in case his coin lands tails when I call heads, I’ll confess that I think the same thing every time I let one of those lingering interstitial moments take me:
If this is the end, I’m glad it happened here.
If this is the end, I’m glad I spent it with you.
I’m posting this piece very early. If you got this far, I’m guessing you’ll understand why.
This is the second piece this year that I can’t read through without tearing up.
Some pieces manufacture a greater truth; other pieces discover it.
Not to be a broken record, but: if you got this far, I’m guessing you’ll understand which one this was.
“It’s only when we forfeit control that we can know what we’d do if we actually had it.“ yes!! Needed words, & words to live by.