I have dozens of notebooks. I love them! Writing in them is so fun and exciting... So why are the majority of them blank?
It's hard for me to take that "big step" of writing in a notebook for the first time. Suddenly, all the potential that the notebook had when I first bought it is destroyed. It becomes a planner. It becomes a song book. It becomes a messy mixture of drawings, lists, and ideas. It's no longer a journal. It's no longer a response log. It's no longer a fashion design book. All of its previously-held possibilities are stripped from it, and it becomes one thing, or a disorganized mixture of incongruous things.*
Similarly, it's hard for me to make decisions about college, careers, and my future in general. All the potential, all the possibilities I'd previously had to choose from are gone. With each additional decision I make, a potential future, a potential life, dies. If I choose to go to college A, the versions of me that chose to go to colleges B-Z die. If I choose to become an artist, all the other versions of me that chose other careers will die. The astrophysicist dies, the actress dies, the teacher dies. Maybe two of them can live together, simultaneously, but, even with the option of cohabitation, countless versions of me will die. You can only do so many things in one lifetime.
This is making me think of the episode "Remedial Chaos Theory" from season 3 of Community. If you haven't seen Community, or if you haven't gotten that far in it, I highly suggest you make your way up to it.
"I wonder what happened in all those other timelines."
*Wow, that's a little cheesy. I'm cringing just the tiniest bit at that, and I wrote it. Ich.