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Friends, not long ago I found myself facing a dilemma. The details of it aren’t important, but let’s just say that two paths diverged in a yellow wood, and I wanted to travel both.

It’s a common crucible we finite humans face: Inevitably every choice we make precludes some other choice, one perhaps equally desirable. Walking through one door often means we must leave others closed, the potential delights behind them forever out of our reach, the nail-biting Showcase Showdown of life with every single choice we face.

Choose one romantic partner and you close off the possibility of the life you might have had with a different one. Take one job offer and you must turn down another. Bid on one house and you may miss out on another you might have loved even more. Our lives are a series of sliding doors where every single choice sends it branching into a new path—and cuts off the other ones at that juncture.

This may be easier to accept in theory than in practice.

I’m usually pretty good at decisions, but my recent dilemma for some reason sent me into paralysis. I could not pick a path; I had compelling reasons to want to choose both, but that wasn’t an option. Like all the best crucibles in our stories, taking one road meant I had to forsake the other.

I hashed it out with my husband and best friend, but I still couldn’t stop agonizing over it. I’d made a commitment, I whined to my trusted advisers. I didn’t want to let anyone down. But I also felt as if breaking it would offer me some long-term opportunities and relieve some work pressure I was feeling.

My friend just laughed as I worked myself into a guilt spiral. “You’re not going to escape this unscathed,” she finally said.

And suddenly the spell was broken; her simple observation startled a laugh out of me too and put everything back in perspective.

It wasn’t so much the choice itself I was wrestling with. It was that I didn’t want to feel the discomfort of having made it, and cutting off one of the roads before me.

Choosing One Possibility Means Giving Up Another

As creatives we are constantly facing choices—many of them in our art blessedly malleable, at least until we’ve published our stories (and even after that, if we indie publish). If you don’t like one path you’ve sent your character down, you can hit delete and let them travel a new one. If the story isn’t coming together, you can noodle endlessly on different ways to address it, always just an iterative save and an “undo changes” away from another choice.

But we still have to decide which story we’ll work on when—out of the many ideas that so many writers are teeming with—and for most authors that means the others have to stay simmering on the back burner throughout the fairly long commitment of seeing a story through to completion. Deciding to publish The Intuitive Author last year meant my character-development book got sidelined for more than a year.

We also have to consider other goals we have in our lives and balance our writing time with allowing time for other things that are important to us. If I commit to a heavy teaching/speaking schedule, that means I’m unlikely to be able to dedicate much time to writing. If I book up my editing openings for months in advance—which lets me plan my schedule and count on a steady stream of work—I might not have an opening for a publisher or author I want to work with when they ask me to edit a project with a tighter timeline. Or if I do try to fit in something I want to work on, I have to carve it out of the time I reserve for my husband and family and friends, my hobbies and interests and downtime.

You undoubtedly face similar choices in your own life: Do you sacrifice that much-needed hour of sleep to get up early and fit in your daily word count? Give up some of your vacation time or budget to attend that writer’s conference or retreat? Miss out on time with loved ones or for your other priorities and pursuits in order to meet that deadline?

Do you write the book of your heart or the one you think will sell more readily? Do you stand by the story you want to tell or listen to your beta readers or crit partners or agent or editor who may want you to kill some darlings? Do you indie-publish your story, sign with a small press, pursue a trad-pub contract—knowing that each of those publishing paths has its advantages and challenges, and that choosing one precludes the others, at least for that particular book?

Everything is a trade-off. Every choice we make has a cost.

Everything is a trade-off. Every choice we make has a cost.

You may spend years on your passion project and then see it languish in a drawer or on the shelves when you find there is no market for it. You may indie-publish and pour your energy and effort and money into the effort, only to struggle to find a wide audience—or choose to trad pub for the broader reach or perceived prestige, only to sink in the vast sea of book releases mere weeks after your own.

Here’s the other vexing issue about making these choices: We have no way of knowing which one is “right.” Not even in hindsight, because the road not traveled will always be a mystery. Things might have turned out better, or they might have turned out much, much worse.

These inevitable, inflexible truths are the reasons behind the indecision paralysis I was feeling—that so many of us often feel: Maybe if we simply don’t make the decision at all we can leave our options open. Or maybe if the decision is made for us we won’t have to feel the doubt or guilt or remorse or whatever the cost of choosing one of the paths before us, and forsaking all others.

But when we fail to make these choices for our own lives, we’re sacrificing our agency. We’re giving over the course of our lives to other people and outside forces, or dooming ourselves to live in static limbo, never denying ourselves any of the paths before us, but never making any progress along any of them either.

We can’t choose among all our great ideas for a story—so we don’t write any of them at all. Or we poke at several of them, never really making any meaningful progress at growing them into anything. Or we bury ourselves in “research” or planning and plotting, telling ourselves that we’re preparing ourselves to best tell the story…but really we’re putting off ever trying to tell it at all. Or we don’t query because “it’s not ready yet” and “we only get one shot.”

After all, if we never try, we’ll never fail. If we never commit, we never have to cut off any of the other possibilities.

But we also never do. We never fully live. We never give ourselves the chance to fail so that we can take what we learn from those failures in order to ultimately succeed.

Read more: “Failure IS an Option”

Taking Control of Your Choices

I think the hardest dilemma I ever faced was when my husband and I had to decide whether to have children. We met late enough in life that we had to make up our minds pretty quickly, and while we felt powerfully pulled in both directions, we decided we wanted a chance to be a couple first, before we created a larger family.

And then time and biology and life choices meant that we had ultimately made our decision, and it was final. We would not be parents.

This choice did not come easily. But the hardest part was after it was irrevocably made. I had never tasted regret as keenly as I did when I realized that this was a road we’d never travel.

And yet…and yet! We have no control over how our lives might have turned out if we had had children—any more than we knew, or can still know, what our lives may hold because we didn’t.

But what we do have control over is how we decide to feel about the choice we made—and we have made a deliberate decision to embrace it.

Rather than dwell on what we’ll never have, we choose to be grateful for freedoms we enjoy that we might not have if we’d had children, opportunities and options that might be easier or more readily available. Instead of mourning the experiences we passed up, we embrace the ones we can take advantage of. Instead of bemoaning the love we may never know, we choose to appreciate the worries and fears we need never have.

Rather than tie ourselves into knots wondering what-if, we focus on what is.

The truth with most of the choices we face is that things wouldn’t have been better or worse no matter what path you chose. They’re just different.

Making a Choice Despite Discomfort

What roads are you hesitating before? What choices are you wrestling with? What dilemmas of your own are causing your own little dark night of the soul like the one I was spiraling into when I couldn’t tolerate the discomfort of having to make a choice between two desirable paths?

Read more: “If You Feel Like Shit, Sit with It”

To quote my wise friend, you are not going to escape this unscathed. Life, as my mother is fond of saying, is a series of choices, and you must bear the weight of the ones you make and all the roads they may close off.

But you also have some potent resources to draw from within yourself. Deep down, I suspect many of us know which way we’re leaning with most of our decisions. We need only allow ourselves to want—and admit—what we really want, and be willing to accept the consequences of choosing: either allowing ourselves to choose what we want most and accepting the loss and costs of the road not taken, or deciding that those costs aren’t worth it, and letting go of goals that may not be compatible with other values in our life.

My husband and friend helped me dig down to what I wanted most between my two options, and my friend’s question liberated me to make that choice.

We have to accept reality: Hard choices are inevitable because our human lifespan is limited and finite. We cannot do it all. You can’t escape unscathed.

Read more: “The Great and Terrible Power of ‘No’ in Your Writing”

Consider your options. Make what feels like the rightest choice. Offer yourself some grace for being human and fallible. Decide to be happy with whatever choices you make.

And that, to go back to the Frost poem, will make all the difference.

Authors, let me hear from you: What kinds of choices do you wrestle with in your writing career—and in your life? How do you make the important decisions you need to make—and how do you weigh the costs against the gains?

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Read more: One of my own choices—my latest book for authors, The Intuitive Author: How to Create and Grow a Happier Writing Career—offers more insights, suggestions, and tips for consciously creating the satisfying, sustainable writing career you want.