LIFE

The Fog of Crisis

When other people cloud your decision tree

Dawn Nelson
2 min readSep 11, 2024

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The morning fog. Photo by author.

Adversity spurs growth, they say.

As my kids and I navigate a major life change, I’ve noticed some folks in my life attempt to lecture me on how to evaluate circumstances. As if they know… except they have no life experience in these matters.

None at all.

It seems rather strange, this overconfidence in telling me what to do. Frankly, it’s annoying. I have major decisions to navigate, and I don’t need any more fog.

Sometimes, I think if I were still married, people would not relate to me so condescendingly. A bias against single parent heads of household seems to be a rather common occurrence.

But when there are crises, I don’t have time to entertain bias.

I need to act.

So, how do I handle these distractions? I squelch the noise. I need to listen to my own instincts, and anything that gets in the way of that is noise.

Squelch.

Focus.

I say no to managing other people, their emotions, their expectations, and anything else they bring that has no priority in the matter at hand.

I let it go.

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Dawn Nelson

Artist, writer, strategist ~ writing creative nonfiction, memoir, essay. WIP: 0100 Series & a morning bulletin. Sometimes a Sunday Dispatch. Sometimes all 3.