The Silver Medal No One Gave Me
The Hidden Burden of Decisions That Were Never Really Yours
7/7/20261 min read
Have you ever heard someone say, “You had a choice,” and you think back to that moment?
You made the decision in a matter of seconds because it didn’t feel much like a choice.
Or someone reminds you years later that it was your decision, and you find yourself asking,
What was the other option?
Have you ever felt that while everyone from the outside sees you living a full and complete life, full of choices, from the inside it feels like a forced life where the important decisions were already made for you?
And yet, somehow, you still carry the burden and responsibility of those choices.
I am not yet ready to share the specifics of such moments in my life, but I have been there.
I have been asked to choose while also being shown every consequence of every option until only one of them felt acceptable.
No one ever said, “You have to.”
They didn’t need to.
In the corporate world, this is considered a strength.
One of the biggest tools in stakeholder management is getting a decision made by your stakeholders while making them feel it was theirs all along. You present options, shape the discussion, highlight the risks—and if you’ve done it well, they walk away believing they chose.
But when the same thing is done to you, in your own life, it doesn’t feel like guidance.
It feels like you were handed the responsibility for a decision that had already been made.
You don’t just live with the outcome.
You live with the guilt of believing it was your choice.
People say I had a choice.
Sometimes, all you are handed is a list of casualties and a pen, asked to pick the best of your losses.
There are no podiums for those moments. No one hands you a prize for surviving the options you never wanted.
Congratulations to me on the silver medal…
…for winning the best of my losses.