When There Is No Right Answer

Tuesday, 08 March 2022 Written by Nimue Brown

Sometimes there is no winning move. Anything you might do would be a compromise, or a bad choice. It’s impossible to make good choices when you don’t have good options. I go round this a lot with health issues because often the thing that fixes one problem is a high risk for causing another and some days all I can do is choose the terms on which I’m going to be in pain.

Some things are unfixable. There is no magic wand. Not everything can be put right. No matter how deeply you may feel that you *should* be able to make it all ok again, sometimes that’s not even possible.

Sometimes these things are true because you’ve been set up. Whatever you do is going to be wrong. Bullies do this. People interested in coercion and control do this. It can be really hard to see when you’re in there, constantly feeling like you should have realised and done the other thing and unable to see that you’re in a trap and there was no right answer.

In my experience, the quest for the right answer can be both exhausting and impossible. If a right answer doesn’t even exist, you can waste a lot of time and energy looking for it. All the second guessing and self doubt doesn’t help, either.

It is ok to do the best you can with what you’ve got. It is entirely good enough to make the best decision you have with the information you’ve got – even if in hindsight you can see why that wasn’t optimal. If all else fails, doing whatever seems kindest or most honourable is a good response to an impossible situation. Sometimes all you get to hang on to is the knowledge that you acted with integrity, even if that didn’t work out well.

Sometimes all we get to do is choose the way in which we are going to fail. There is comfort in picking a path that feels honourable.

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