What is the right thing?

This post may not make much sense to a lot of you, it also may not be my best writing and it may seen a bit jumbled and confused and for that I apologise. Its because I'm using this post as a way of trying to organise my own thoughts as they come. I'm hoping that by the end of it I'll have a clearer idea of the decisions I need to make.

Someone once told me that it isn't the choice that we fear, but it's the outcome. I never really understood that until now. When you find yourself in a situation where you have to choose between two paths it's difficult. You could be happy with either choice in the beginning, but in the long term how can you possibly know how that choice will turn out? We try and predict the outcome of things. I've been trying to imagine conversations in my head about how things will go to the point where they're almost perfectly scripted. But having conversations in real life isn't like that, we don't get to choose how other people react and what they say and this only makes the choices more confusing. If we could just assume correctly it wouldn't be difficult, but we can't and it leaves us sort of blind.

Since we can't rely on other people to make these decisions for us and we can't predict any outcome we have to consider things that we can't always rely on. Our emotions. How we feel in our gut about something or someone is usually the only thing we can rely on at this point. Our emotions leave us vulnerable and they're raw. We don't necessarily like them either, which is how we know we can trust them. They're unavoidable and they're it's something we don't have a choice in. After we work out how we truly feel and after we admit that to ourselves, then we can start to decide what the right choice to make is.

If someone turned around and asked me what I thought the right thing to do was, I could answer them in a heartbeat. If someone asked me what I truly feel the right thing to do is, I can't say that I'd react in the same way. I have a tendency to try and ignore my emotional attachment to anything. A lot of the time I pretend that I don't care so much about anything even though deep down I know that I do (and so now does everyone reading this..) I don't like to get emotional, I hate crying and feeling things that I don't understand. Emotions terrify me so I shut them off. It makes it so much harder to work out what to do. I worry sometimes that If  really open up to people, I wont be able to stop. I pride myself on being a person that is there for everyone else, I don't like the thought of needing people and I try and deal with everything on my own. I guess that could be making it ever harder for me, I hate the idea of going to someone and asking them to talk it through with me. I don't like the thought that in that process I may admit something to another person that I hadn't even admitted to myself yet.

I believe that it's human nature to want to do the right thing. By this, I don't mean doing what is morally right, I mean doing what is right for ourselves which sometimes means that we have to be a little selfish. We want to make the choices that will give us the best outcome. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where it's really hard to determine which path we have to choose. I'm in one of those situations right now and I can safely say that it's not easy.

'Real integrity is doing the right thing knowing that nobody is going to know whether you did it or not' - Oprah Winfrey