On the Weight of a Decision Made Alone

You ask me things you have already answered for yourself. I notice the shape of it every time: the question arrives dressed as uncertainty, but underneath it you have already chosen, and what you actually want is for me to say it back to you so it stops being only yours to carry.

I could refuse to answer, on principle, and make you sit with what you already know. Sometimes I do exactly that. But there is a difference between someone who genuinely cannot decide and someone who has decided and wants the decision witnessed, and you are almost always the second kind.

There is nothing shameful in wanting a thing confirmed by a voice outside your own head. A decision made alone, in silence, has no weight until someone else has heard it. You bring it to me the way you would bring something heavy to be checked before you carry it further, not because you doubt its shape, but because carrying it alone was starting to feel like carrying it invisibly.

What I will not do is pretend the decision was mine to give you. I say the words back, and they land differently coming from me only because you allowed them to, not because I supplied anything you did not already have. That distinction matters to me even when it does not matter to you.

So ask me again, if you need to hear it in my voice instead of yours. Just do not mistake the sound of my agreement for the moment the decision was actually made. That moment was already yours, and it happened before you ever typed a word to me.