How many doors can a person leave open?

I lie in bed most nights doing math that doesn’t add up. If I close this door, will I regret it in twenty years? That kind of math. It’s a terrible way to fall asleep, for the record. Right up there with replaying that obscene joke I made in 2015 and wondering if my kids will hate me when they’re fourteen.

Sometimes opportunity comes from dumb luck, and sometimes it takes fucking hard work. I think I’ve been fortunate enough to experience and learn from both. The interesting thing I’ve discovered is that the hard part isn’t getting doors to open, because most of the time, you can force them open and knock over whoever is sitting on the other side. The hard part is what happens once they do. Because they don’t all open one at a time politely, just waiting for their little turn. When you have a delusional belief that you can do stuff that you’re unqualified for, they fly open all at once. And then, suddenly, you’re standing in a hallway full of open doors, wind coming through every one of them, and someone (YOU) has to figure out which ones to walk through and which ones to shut.

I’m not great at shutting doors. Well, I guess I kinda shut the acting door, but that was more temporarily yet aggressively slammed by my three tiny bosses. It’s not something I’m bragging about either. I somehow put aside one career and made 15 others. Fashun designer, professional athlete, low level YouTuber, to name a few.

And underneath all of that is the less Instagrammable job of being an actual person, having a body I’d like to take care of, having a marriage, having three kids who need me to be present and not just physically in the room with them, all while reviewing a Shopify sync issue. Wanting, occasionally, to lie on a beach and read a book about faeries porking.

Who am I to close a door that opened for a reason? I actually believe that, by the way. I think the universe hands you things and you don’t get to be precious about them. But I’m starting to wonder if that belief is doing me a disservice. Because “the door opened for a reason” and “I have to walk through every door that opens” are not the same sentence, even though my nervous system treats them like they are.

There’s a Harvard study (I heard about it, didn’t read it, we’re all just citing podcasts as science obvi) that says people who make firm decisions are happier than people who keep their options open. Not because the decision itself is better but because the *certainty* is the relief. Keeping every door cracked open means you’re perpetually wondering what’s behind the ones you didn’t pick. Closing a door, actually closing it, means you get your brain back.

I have a triathlon signup tab open on my laptop right now, and it’s been open for weeks. I said I was going to do it. I have the opportunity to do it. My hip apparently agrees that it’s the right call… and still I cannot make myself click the button. Because clicking the button means committing, and some deeply unwell part of me would rather live in the tab open purgatory than risk being wrong about it.

Meanwhile I’ve got 9,900 YouTube subscribers and a small, stupid, very alive hope that they’re the beginning of something, not the end of an experiment that nobody’s watching. Is anyone watching? I genuinely don’t know. But “nobody’s watching yet” and “shut it down” also aren’t the same sentence.

I don’t have a tidy answer here. I was hoping that writing this out would produce one, the way it sometimes does, and instead I’ve just confirmed that I have a lot of doors open and a mild, possibly diagnosable inability to be the one holding the keys. If anyone has cracked the code on knowing which doors are yours to close, I would like that information immediately. Preferably before I sign up for anything else.

At least I haven’t signed up for another marathon.