This is for posterity. I do not want to forget how I felt while choosing this path I’ve decided to tread. So trying my best to freeze this state of mind.

The torments, too real. The uncertainty, unbearable. The guilt of preference, heavy. The effort, exhausting. The self-inflicted suspense, agonising. The confusion, maddening.

It was as if there were two familiar but opposing people inside me.

In the wee hours of early mornings, I would wake up totally convinced of one and have concrete reasons for not taking the other. And when I’d wake up again I would have flipped with all the more concrete reasons against the choice.

Now it’s done. I used logic over emotion (hopefully) and have made a choice. It has not only, as the proverbial saying goes, lifted the weights off my shoulders, but it feels more like I’ve dragged myself out from quick sand.

Is this path the right choice? I’ll never know. All I can do is feel right on a daily basis and that has already begun.

Robert Frost, of course, summarised these feelings best in his poem “The Road Not Taken”.

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.