roads diverging in woods

we all must choose what we become. if we do not choose, life chooses for us. life chooses for us anyway, of course. but i still think that we have this tiny bit of human agency. perhaps it is a foolish thought, but it is one i must cling to. of course, choices do not have beginnings and ends like ball games. rather, they confront us again and again throughout our lives, they live within us, they make us who we are.
today i remembered a choice i made which even now seems strange to me. freshman year of college we had a writing contest in my dorm, which was fashioned a "house" in the ivy league style-- not technically, but in spirit. our house had a theme which we explored, and several co-curricular events and common readings were structured around the theme. we all read a short story: a very old man with enormous wings, by marquez. i liked the story. i liked marquez's style of writing, which did not fill in blanks for you. it created more mysteries than it answered. we read the story and dissected it in class.
(this is the reason i chose not to become an english major-- an essentially selfish one: i like the way books make me feel, as if i have entered my own private strange world. dissecting this world makes it less real, it makes the world a simple equation. i did not wish to unravel the masterpieces of these worlds, and their strangeness. i never really read books more than once. of course, academically, this is silly. there is so much to learn in just one book, probably so much that you could read only that one book (if it were good enough) the rest of your life and keep learning new things. but it is never the same as the first time you read it, and the characters became real to you, and you could imagine the world in which they lived and spoke to one another and loved. you no longer feel the part of a lucky observer of an undiscovered world the second time you open a book, and i never want to lose that.)
anyway, somehow after reading this story, and others, our dorm had a fable writing contest. and when it was announced, i somehow knew deep in my bones that i could win this contest. i knew how to write things that people liked, that won prizes. so i began two stories: one that i wanted to write, and one that i knew would win the contest. the one that could win, i knew, was well-written. i still have it and read it. the imagery is striking, but the story is too familiar. it is a fable i wrote because i thought i knew its lesson. i wrote it on behalf of someone that i thought could learn from it. looking back on it, somewhere i knew, even at the age of eighteen, that i did not want to write fables because i did not want to pretend that i knew what the right thing was to do. i did not want to teach anyone a lesson, since i had so many lessons to learn. (save, of course, he whom i wrote the fable for, who was exempt from my distaste for salvationism. he, i attempted to teach-- but even then i knew it was forced, canned, patronizing.)
fables do not let people figure things out for themselves. and so i handed in the one i wanted to write. it was strange and unfamiliar and did not entirely make sense. i do not remember the grade i got on it but i remembered the comment: something to the effect of me not entirely grasping what a fable was supposed to be. the contest deadline passed, and i handed in the proper fable to make up the grade. when i got the new paper back, it was graded an A. my professor took me aside after class.
"this is beautiful! it's too bad you hadn't handed this into the contest."
i shrugged. i was stubborn then... determined to be something i was not, or perhaps to make a choice to be someone else. i was smug, knowing that i had written a fable that could have won. but you see, i handed it in for a grade, so i wasn't such a rebel after all.
so why did i do it?

these thoughts came to me today as i walked on a different campus with different stone buildings and different towers. i read a book yesterday and today, and as i walked i was half immersed in the reverie of the book, and half immersed in the memory of the above events. "i could write a book," i thought to myself. perhaps, i could. but perhaps i could do anything. my mother told me a few weeks ago over the phone, "you can do anything you want to do." to what extent is it true? certainly, had i taken the right classes, perhaps i could have been an architect... one of my childhood dreams. or a doctor, which is apparently what everyone who knew me as a child thought i might grow up to be. perhaps i still could be a professor, a lawyer, a chef, a publisher, a photographer. there are certain things i cannot be. an athlete, a dancer, an accomplished classical musician. a psychiatrist. an actor. (i used to fool myself in thinking i would be a good actor, but i am so self-conscious i doubt it could work. i touch my face when i am nervous. i could never completely become someone else.) i hate the question, "what do you want to do?" because the truth is i do not know, other than be myself and go wherever that takes me. perhaps i hate it because i like better the safety of not having more things to add to the list of things i cannot be. if i handed in the fable that could have won... but it did not... fable writer would be off the list. if i did write a book, or tried to, and failed, i might never be able to say "i could have been a writer."
i possess the capacity to do many things, or the potentiality to be many things. but choosing just one... even if it is only temporary, seems unfair. it seems to be a bit like the work of my class... to examine the decision made to do x, make the light across the pond be green, for example, and then conclude something from that. would people be able to conclude something about me if i chose to do x?
when i was in high school, i thought people hated me. but i realized that i spent so much time trying to blend in with the wall, that very few people knew me. i thought the other day of a group of girls who gave me a nickname derived, in a weird way, from my last name. i could never figure out what they meant by calling me it. were they making fun of me? i assumed yes. i remember sitting in my desk, in english class (i liked english class better in high school, it was basic, with the goal of just getting us to read things and that reading and understanding the story as it was was a significant enough accomplishment) tormenting myself over whether or not these girls were being nice to me or making fun of me by calling me this nickname. i was a junior, or maybe a senior, sixteen and still so desparate to be anywhere but there and be anyone but me. i thought of movies and tv shows and books about kids like me, or kids who i thought were like me, and i summoned up courage that i thought came from some secret well-spring of nerd-inner strength. "that is not my name," i said, with a hint of derision. "please don't call me that, ok?"
of course, they laughed. "whoaaaaaaa" they said, looking at each other and laughing, mocking my seriousness.

when i got to college i decided that i wouldn't take anything too seriously.
of course, despite my stubborn intentions that didn't last long. in fact, it never honestly worked. as when i handed in my "correct" fable to change my grade, i was only half-heartedly interested in being disinterested.
this remains my problem today, the two sides of myself, of the many sides of myself, which disagree.

there is only one thing which all the versions of myself do: they all love.