"What happened the day I met your father," she said, "is that I learned you have to choose. For better or for worse. You have ot choose what your life is going to look like.
I tried to swallow, tried to think of what I wanted to say, what I was really thinking. "I just don't feel like i have good choices yet," I said. "It makes it hard to give up the old ones."
She waved me off. "Well. You're behind all that anyway," she said. "You're still stuck on the same part you were stuck on at seven."
"What part is that?"
"The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren't anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You're still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be."
[...]
I was living in a small town, all alone, which would have been fine if I had chosen it for myself. But I had just not chosen anything else, and all of a sudden, it because very clear to me that this wasn't at all the same thing.
Laura Dave, London is the Best City in America
