There is a difference between making decisions and having a sense of choice.
I have made many decisions in my life. That is not the issue. The issue is that very few of them felt freely chosen.
I did not choose to be born. Like most people, I arrived without consent. What followed did not correct that imbalance. Much of my childhood was shaped by obligation, expectation, and force. Choices were made around me, not with me. Preference was secondary to survival.
Over time, this becomes internalized.
Even when options appear, they do not feel open. They feel pre-shaped, narrow, already leaning toward a specific outcome. Choosing becomes less an act of agency and more an attempt to minimize damage.
I remember choosing to study archaeology. It felt like a rare moment of alignment. That choice did not survive the weight placed on it. The structure, the pressure, the way it quickly became something imposed rather than explored, broke whatever sense of freedom had been there. I did not fail it. It ceased to be mine.
The same pattern repeats elsewhere.
The countries I have lived in were not the result of longing or curiosity. They were the result of circumstance, family gravity, necessity. I live in Denmark not because I chose it, but because I ended up here. If choice had been available in the way people imagine it, I would have gone elsewhere. Japan. Canada. Places that called to me without obligation.
Even in relationships, choice has been distorted.
I did not choose freely. I chose among those who chose me. That may sound similar, but it is not. One is movement toward desire. The other is selection under constraint.
When my last relationship ended, it was not by my choice. What followed was not transformation, but turbulence. A cascade of consequences I did not initiate and could not stop. And within that period, there was only one thing I felt the urge to choose, one direction that felt like agency rather than reaction. Each time I tried, my own body resisted. As it has many times before.
Mind and body misaligned.
Desire blocked at the threshold.
Even my sense of self feels shaped more by survival than by freedom. Not even the body I inhabit feels like a choice I made. This is difficult to name without being misunderstood, but it matters. When identity itself feels imposed, agency becomes abstract. The idea that one can simply “choose differently” starts to sound theoretical.
This is not a rejection of responsibility.
It is an observation about freedom.
Some lives unfold through expansion. Others through adaptation. When you are trained to adapt early, choice does not disappear, but it becomes fragile. It hesitates. It fractures under pressure.
I am not writing this to claim that choice does not exist.
I am writing to say that for some of us, it has been consistently obstructed.
And living without a felt sense of choice is not neutrality.
It is a quiet erosion.
Naming that is not defeat.
It is the first honest description of the terrain.