Would you rather?

1. Have long-term happiness or short-term ecstasy?
   
2. Have someone be undyingly committed to you or infinitely stimulating?
   

When I was younger, I never thought that anything had to be a tradeoff or that anything would have to be a compromise. I wanted everything - very much in the nature of a compulsive perfectionist. I also could never make any decisions. Because I simply couldn't deal with tradeoffs. Everyone called me "Miss I-don't-know," and trust me, I knew or at least thought I knew everything.

Have I learned anything since? Or have I just gotten jaded, after seeing disappointment after disappointment. After working in a job that is all about prioritization and trade-offs. Was the lesson of life learning how to settle?

How has time factored into this lesson? When I was younger, life was a huge unknown. But it wasn't a scary unknown, because 1) I thought I had all the time in the world to get the unknown that was my life right. 2) I really couldn't see out past 4 years in the future anyway. At 12, who can see past 16? At 16 who thought they'd make it to 21?

At some point, my perspective changed from thinking that I had all the time in the world to thinking that I was running out of time. I started thinking things like "I have to take advantage of my youth because before I know it I'm going to be fat and wrinkly!" Yes, that's shallow - but the physical limitations of old age are really scaring me!

And then there's the even bigger question "What am I doing with my life?!!!" I want my life to finally start falling in place. There are so many unknowns and so many things get thrown at you unexpectedly in life, can't I just get a little bit of certainty? Please? In any of the aspects of my life? It's like in Sim City where you have the bar graph with the three bars: Industrial, Residential, Commercial - and you're franticly putting out fires because you take care of one and then the other one goes to hell.

So yeah, the question of longterm happiness vs. short term ecstasy... (Ecstasy being the only word I could think of on the fly as the extreme of happiness.) There's a part of me that has stopped believing in finding the ONE. (when it comes to my personal sim city bars of career, love, and friends, clearly the one needing help right now is love so that's what I'm referring to) Not because I don't want someone that rocks my world but because I want something I can depend on. I want that bar graph for love to be up for a while. I'm tired of just not knowing where my life is going.

So now if I draw on every idealistic bone inside me and try to convince myself "Don't settle" it's just a hard thing to do. It's a hard thing to think that for love or career or friends - that any of those don't have to be such a tradeoff. Can I have faith that if I work for things, they will come? No! Because sh*t happens and sh*t has happened before.

So what do I do now?