I am a good decision maker, by which I mean that I make decisions pretty quickly and then stick with them without wavering.  I just get a sense that X is the correct way to go, and I go with it, very rarely looking back or considering the other options.

I recently read an article about decision-making that began with this thought:

I became obsessed with this question: How do I know if what I’m thinking is coming from my brain or my gut? And if there is such a thing as gut-level instinct separate from my rational brain, how do I know that I can really trust it?

Uh… I don’t know.  I know I use rational thought to gather evidence and define the options and then I go to the gut-level to ask myself A, B, or C.  But when does the brain hand off the process to the gut, and why did we ever think the gut would be as good as a brain when deciding the right way to go?

The article mixes up using your gut to make a decision and using your gut to sense danger — two completely different jobs for your gut to do beyond process food — but it’s full of interesting thoughts about the decision-making process.

Do you feel like you make decisions well or do you struggle to know what you want to do?

Not sure what #MicroblogMondays is? Read the inaugural post which explains the idea and how you can participate too.

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We don’t celebrate Christmas, so I live vicariously through all of your Internet postings.  I love hearing about Christmas traditions.

Like do you go away or host it?  Hang stockings for decoration or fill them?  Church or no church?  What are you eating today?

Do you open gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning?  And during gift opening, do you go one person at a time so everyone can watch other people open presents or do you open gifts at the same time?  Are you ever surprised or do you pretty much know what’s under the tree?

So tell me about your Christmas (or grab a good idea for next year if one pops up in the comment section).

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Are you also doing #MicroblogMondays? Add your link below. The list will be open until Tuesday morning. Link to the post itself, not your blog URL. (Don’t know what that means? Please read the three rules on this post to understand the difference between a permalink to a post and a blog’s main URL.) Only personal blogs can be added to the list. I will remove any posts that are connected to businesses or are sponsored post.

It’s not the first article I’ve read with this sentiment, and I’m sure it won’t be the last: “It seems increasingly likely that our society will one day view our infatuation with Twitter, Facebook, and the like as a passing, often destructive fad.” 

It feels a little like the predicted death of blogging.  They keep telling me that blogs are dead, yet I keep writing one so I know that at least one is still alive.

Articles like these make me sad.  It’s not the promise that everyone will abandon ship soon, but because they focus only on the negative aspects of the platforms.  Are there negative aspects, yes.  Absolutely.  Beyond a doubt.  But there are also positive aspects that are being dismissed because they don’t fit the narrative.

Before I started blogging, I knew other infertile women in my area and we talked about our family building failures, but it wasn’t the same as when I found all of you online.  I could read your stories and feel part of something different.  Not different in the bad sense, but just… different.  Like there were people who conceived easily and those who didn’t, and I was part of the didn’t crowd and other people were part of the easy crowd.  Finding so many other infertile people made me feel like I wasn’t a little dot of different in a same world.  It changed the narrative.

I met people online that I would never have gotten to meet in the offline world because we lived too far apart for our lives to intersect.  There is always someone out there, ready for a conversation.  Always someone out there with advice or an answer when I ask a question.  That is social media, too.

Tonight is Christmas Eve.  Not my holiday, but I feel a part of it because of social media.  I’m not just driving by houses, seeing lights on the outside.  I’m opening up Facebook and being invited into meal preparation and decorations and funny moments in someone else’s family.  That is social media as well.

I’m staying.  Hope you are, too.

Dirk Gently was cancelled, and I’m bummed.  We watched the season finale on Monday night.  I tried to convince Josh that we should save the last episode and savour it because it would be months before the new season began.  But, no, he haaaaaaaad to watch it and find out what happened with Wendimoor.  And then Tuesday, I found out the show was cancelled, so the season finale became the series finale.  It was the best thing on television and now it’s gooooooooooone.

Dirk Gently, you were a spot of happiness on a dreary day.  You were always good.  You were always funny.  You always filled up my heart.  I’ll purchase the show in iTunes so the twins can watch it in the future.  And now I have to go back to weeping.

It is easier to be bummed about Dirk Gently than it is to wrap my brain around the state of the world.

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Stop procrastinating.  Go make your backups.  Don’t have regrets.

Seriously.  Stop what you’re doing for a moment.  It will take you fifteen minutes, tops.  But you will have peace of mind for days and days.  It’s the gift to yourself that keeps on giving.

As always, add any new thoughts to the Friday Backup post and peruse new comments in order to find out about methods, plug-ins, and devices that help you quickly back up your data and accounts.

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And now the blogs…

But first, second helpings of the posts that appeared in the open comment thread last week.  In order to read the description before clicking over, please return to the open thread:

• “What I Know, What I Suspect” (Pages, Stages, and Rages)

Okay, now my choices this week.

Searching for Our Silver Lining has an update about her job situation as well as lessons learned from infertility.  It is… sadly… a framing that actually brings peace of mind.  “One major benefit of infertility is you learn that the fear of failure and breaking is always worse than it actually happening. Though each miscarriage and failed cycle left indelible scars, the fear was always far more crippling.”  It’s true because I think the moments beforehand break you and break you and break you.  By the time you get to the actual breaking, you’re already in pieces.  And sometimes a break — breaking free of what you think you should do, breaking tradition, breaking up with something that isn’t working — is exactly what you need.

By the Brooke has a post about flowers she purchased in Eliza’s memory for a church service.  Seven red roses for a daughter who should be seven.  She explains, “Having people know about Eliza, know that I had a baby who died, makes me feel vulnerable. But if they don’t know, I feel a little bit like a fraud, or at least like I’m only connected to them in the most superficial way possible.”  Now they know.  But she also knows something, too: “December will never not be sad for me, but seven years in, I’m also grateful that I can find the hope in the dark.”

Lastly, Not a Wasted Word asks where is her aha moment; that moment of clarity where her life falls into place?  Will we all have one, and if not, why do some people have their mental light bulb spark on while others fumble around in the dark?  She writes, “I’ve done all the things everyone tells you to do, and I’m still, YEARS LATER, making the same mistakes, unable to change.”  I don’t have answers, but it’s a very interesting question.

The roundup to the Roundup: Bummed about Dirk Gently.  Your weekly backup nudge.  And lots of great posts to read.  So what did you find this week?  Please use a permalink to the blog post (written between December 15th and 22nd) and not the blog’s main url. Not understanding why I’m asking you what you found this week?  Read the original open thread post here.

Two articles — unrelated — came together for the perfect storm of heart squeezing this past weekend.  I’m putting them out there because I’m hoping I will feel differently if we talk about them.

The first one is this.  Yes.  All of it.  Every single word of it.  We are the “wrong place, wrong time” generation.  We are:

The Title IX babies who were the first women in their families to go to college. Or go away to college. Or to live on their own, launch a career, marry in their late 20s (or never) or choose to stay home with their children … They’re smart. They’re grateful for what they have. They’re also exhausted. Some of them are terrified. A few of them are wondering what the point is.

Yes.

Josh passed along the article to me because he thought it would make me feel better to know that everyone is worried all the time, but it actually just made me super sad.  Especially the idea of ambiguous losses:

“Ambiguous losses are a particular type of loss that lack a definition and lack closure,” says Kelly Maxwell Haer, PhD, of the Boone Center for the Family at Pepperdine University, in California. “The ambiguous loss of singleness is particularly challenging to navigate. The person could be found in five minutes. Or never. You’re not going to get an email from God that says you’re never going to have a partner. That hope lingers on, and it’s really hard to live in hope that is not met, but there’s no end. Humans don’t do uncertainty well.”

Replace “singleness” with “infertility” and “found in five minutes” with “successful next cycle.”  That idea of having hope that doesn’t have an expiration point.  It applies to everything big in life: partnership, career, family building.  And it’s exhausting.  It is exhausting to be a constant state of uncertainty; a constant state of striving or trying.  To feeling like once you get one duck in a row, another goes out of line.

So there was that.

The other post was “When I Realized That Some of My Dreams Will Never Come True.” I clicked on it because I was curious: Which of her dreams didn’t come true and was it really too late for it to happen if she wanted to make it her life goal?

I mean, yes, I am well aware that there is an expiration date on certain dreams, or in order to achieve the dream, you need to change the dream a lot.

But there are plenty of things that can still happen up until the day before you die.  Get married?  Run a half-marathon?  Publish a book?  Become a doctor?

But what she’s talking about is… well… all of the above.  The American dream.  Of doing as well as your parents.  Again, we’re the Title IX generation.  We are supposed to be able to have it all, do it all, be anything and everything.  We’re the Free to Be You and Me generation, and we believed Marlo Thomas when she told us that we could be mothers and welders.