Guessing Gumballs
I had the privilege of growing up in a small village of 2,000 people. Every August, the Village hosts Community Days, a time for residents to come together and celebrate village life. The advent of Community Days was marked by bunting which adorned the main streets and brought with it a sense of excitement and anticipation. Community Days’ main event was a parade in which local businesses, emergency services, and groups of community members would show their community spirit by decorating floats towed invariably by tractors and Ford F-150s. After the parade, everyone would gather at the Village office for a whole range of carnival-like activities: bouncy castles, face painting, karaoke, and stalls offering kettle corn and candy floss. One year, the carnival featured a game of guess the gumballs. The child who guessed the number closest to the number of gumballs in the jar would get to take that jar of gumballs home. My Dad followed my cousin and I to the table hosting the game. I immediately began studying the jar, covertly trying to count them. To my 8 year old eyes, they were as numerous as the stars and I felt like I was asked to undertake the impossible: number them.
I settled in myself that there were exactly 106 multicolored gumballs in the jar. I carefully recorded my guess, shielding my scrap of paper from my cousin’s view. Before I submitted my answer, I thought it best to get my Dad’s stamp of approval. I looked up at him excitedly, waiting for him to confirm my brilliance with a simple nod, look, or gesture. Instead, he crouched down and asked if I wanted his opinion. In response to my nod he gently said “I think there might be more gumballs in there. It is a pretty big jar”. He made it clear that I should guess whatever number felt right to me, but that his guess would be closer to 350.
I was immediately torn. My guess was informed by my gut instinct. But his was rooted in greater knowledge and experience than I could have gained in my 8 years. I turned to him and said, what about 356, desperately wanting to keep some piece of my intuitive answer while acknowledging that he likely knew best. He gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up accompanied by a wink. I scratched out my initial guess and carefully wrote “356” in the neatest hand that I could muster. I neatly folded the paper, ensuring the edges aligned perfectly before guiding my thumb along the centre to form a crease. And then I waited the agonising 40 minutes until the winner would be announced. While I was appreciating the freshly painted blue butterfly, the wingspan of which covered my whole face, a voice came over the intercom to announce the winner of the gumball game. I heard the Village Administrator gleefully announce my name over the intercom and her invitation to come claim my prize - the jar of gumballs.
In that moment, I was rewarded for not acting on my instinct, for not following my intuition. I won that prize because I listened to a more knowledgeable, external voice. I knew that had I followed my gut, I’d have walked home empty-handed. My guess of “106” would have been just another wrong number in the pile of discarded scraps of paper. And I took that lesson to heart.
“I was rewarded for not acting on my instinct, for not following my intuition. ”
The indecision that I have experienced in the intervening years has been fueled by the countless moments, just like that one, where I became convinced that trusting my instinct would lead to my demise. I developed a pattern of not following my instinct because it felt like the only way to keep myself safe. I had countless examples of instances where, if I had followed my instinct, I would have gotten the answer wrong or made what I perceived to be the wrong decision. This pattern also shielded me from a level of vulnerability that felt too exposing. If I deferred to someone else and got an answer wrong, any criticism that followed wouldn’t really be a criticism of me. It wasn’t costly for me to defer to someone else or to stay silent. What felt unbearable was the possibility of having someone criticise my gut instinct. To hold out something so intrinsic to my sense of self out for others to challenge, criticise, or reject.
As I became older and more independent, the pattern of deferral that had led to my success in younger years became an obstacle to that success in adulthood. It didn’t feel satisfying or helpful to fail because I had followed advice that I disagreed with. It was frustrating to not understand something but feel unable to pose a question. It felt imprisoning to have an idea or opinion that it felt impossible to voice.
Eventually, I found myself aged 26, a newly qualified lawyer, unable to any answer but “I don’t know” to a question. I couldn’t look around for the answer. But I also couldn’t dare reveal or trust the one that my intuition offered me.
I was able to break out of the pattern of responding to indecision with deference or silence by acknowledging the flawed logic and fear on which I had crafted the pattern. I based my whole approach on a few stand out moments where I was rewarded for not following my intuition. When I vocalised the belief that I couldn’t trust my intuition to my therapist, he told me that while my assessment was understandable, it was also riddled with confirmation bias. Because I was distrustful of my intuition, I only really gathered data about the circumstances where following my instinct would have led me astray, not the thousands of times when I relied on my intuition and came to no harm. In response, I started being more mindful of all of the different decisions that I was making. I started to look for the times when my instinct led me to a favourable result, when I made a big decision based on my gut instinct and was happy with where I ended up, when I gave a quick response that got a laugh. I also started to notice that I most regretted the moments when I didn’t follow my instinct and regretted staying silent or deferring to someone else - because I had had the right answer, I just wasn’t sure enough of myself to offer it.
When I looked closely, I realised that my indecision was, at its root, a self-esteem issue. I considered each moment an opportunity to have parts of myself affirmed. I didn’t believe that I was smart, funny, articulate, or interesting, but I wanted to be all of those things. I believed that I could only be considered to truly possess those attributes if others affirmed them in me. I felt that each choice took me either closer or further from that affirmation, that desired identity. But because the affirmations were earned moment to moment, based on single actions, single choices, I also thought that I could lose those affirmations and that identity in any subsequent moment with a wrong decision. It was this fear that made decisions feel paralysing. This discovery taught me that my relationship with indecision had more to do with how I wanted to be perceived than my actual inability to make a decision.
I’m not indecisive. I never was. I was scared. Scared of the withdrawal of affirmation, which I mistook for love, that would come if I made the wrong decision.
“I’m not indecisive. I never was. I was scared. ”
I was afraid of losing others’ love because that was the foundation upon which I had built my sense of self. I’ll never really know if people thought more or less of me moment to moment and how that influenced their love for me. But even without the benefit of others’ perceptions, I know that my wrong decisions resulted in a changed perception and withdrawal of love. I know that with certainty, because I allowed wrong decisions to change my relationship with and love for myself. I met my every mistake, perceived wrong decisions, or failures with the same judgment and rejection that I feared from and projected onto others.
While the initial criticism or perceived judgment for a wrong decision may have come from an external source, the most painful and sustained harm came from my echoing that criticism and chastising myself almost endlessly for it. My response to any potential misstep was to join what felt like the crowd of voices declaring my worthlessness because of how I performed in a single moment. It was the pain of this self-criticism that ultimately led me to defer to others and to silence myself.
What I wanted was support. To be cheered on no matter what I said. To have space to make mistakes. For a single wrong decision to not have detrimental impacts on my worth. And I have found that, in myself, by honouring and standing behind my decisions.
The panic over decision-making dissipated when I decided that, regardless of the outcome, I would not criticise myself for the decisions that I made. Healing came when I decided that all that I required of myself was to do the best that I could with the information that I had. My self-esteem grew when I decided that I would not see myself to have diminished worth because I gave a wrong answer, made a decision that someone else wouldn’t have made, or asked for the clarification that I needed.
And the funniest thing happened. The more that I comforted myself through moments of criticism and defended my decisions, even if only to myself, the more that I was able to follow my instinct. The more that I looked inside for validation, the more I found my answers inside too. Prioritising integrity and trust in myself means that I no longer face every decision with the fear and uncertainty that I had when I was guessing gumballs.
