 Almost five years ago now, I made the decision to amputate my right leg, personally, battle axe style. But I still can't decide what I want for dinner. Someone explain that to me. Hello there, my beautiful, lovely internet friends, welcome back to my channel. How the heck do you make a decision that A, you can never take back, B, has lifelong ramifications, and C, you have no way of knowing what the outcome is actually going to be. So the depth of really difficult decision making is what we're going to be diving into today. I hope that by the end of this maybe you will feel more empowered than the decisions that you are facing. Though I certainly hope chopping off a body part is not one of those that you have to make a decision on. But if it is, know that you could get through it. Let's dive in. But first, a quick word from Cozy Joe on the couch last night from one of our sponsors. Apologies for interrupting, but Sophie looks so cute, how could I not film right now? I wanted to take a moment to thank our sponsor today, Kenzie. She's so cute. So this right here is their IPL handset that I use for hair removal. So I have always shaved my arms and underpits, but it takes a lot of time, and being an amputee in particular, there's a lot of balancing that can be involved in trying to do that in the shower, which is why I started looking to hair removal instead of shaving every day. Kenzie handset is cost and time savings and has wavelengths that help target various skin conditions, like reducing acne, hair removal, age spots and skin rejuvenation. It delivers quick and long term results that you can see in as little as two to three weeks with full results of 12 weeks. I've been using them for a couple months now, and one of the first things I noticed is that my hair started growing back, but when it did, I started noticing that it was lighter. It wasn't nearly as thick, and I've been easily on my leg, my nubbin and my underarms. This for me was after not shaving for three days, you can barely see any hair growth. There's a little bit still coming in, but it's gotten less and less over time. So when you order this Kenzie, whether you're looking at it for hair removal or something else, you're going to find in the box a quick start guide, the handset itself, a nine foot cord, which is super nice for just chilling wherever you want to chill to do this, and a skin tone chart guide. It comes with a 12 month warranty and a 90 day money back guarantee, making sure that this device works for you or you can return it. It's not even like me in wondering, what does IPO mean? It stands for Intense to Pulse Light. It is broad spectrum to treat a wide area faster, isn't it dovey? She agrees. But we're not going to be doing any hair removal because her hair is so pretty. It's non-radiating, convenient and safe. Before I started using Kenzie, I actually looked into going to an office to a doctor to have hair removal done. Quickly I learned it's very expensive, and also I had one session done, and it was genuinely pretty painful. I like to think that I have a decent pain tolerance, but it did not feel good. I was a little bit nervous when Kenzie arrived to try it, so it's kind of like bracing for the worst, but honestly you barely feel anything. It's not an issue. I don't even flinch. I've always been too scared to try waxing, because maybe I am a baby about pain. So I've always just used conventional razors, but then you run into things like razor burn. For me, trying to balance in the shower sometimes on one leg is just not safe. So Kenzie has been a fantastic choice for me, and maybe it would be for you too. They're also offering you a fantastic discount if you use the link in my bio. Not bio description, if you use the link in the description down below. So the Kenzie handset is super easy to use. Like I said, it comes with that quick start guide, but all you're going to do is plug it in, turn it on, select your desired settings, and get to pressing the button. Like I said, it's not painful. It doesn't take that long. It's kind of fun, relaxing self-care. You can either press the pulse button to flash, or they have glide mode where you can press and hold this button for five seconds, and then it's just going to pulse away with automatic flashing. Like I said, you can see results in as little as two weeks. I did after I want to say a week and a half, but I'll say two weeks to be safe. I started noticing that it was just coming in lighter and less course for me. So like I said, Kenzie is offering an awesome discount of 20% if you use my code in the link in the description. They also have some amazing offers to make this more accessible to people, like a payment plan that's available on their website. So this has been working for me. I'm going to continue using it in the upcoming months and keep you guys updated. If you check this out, I'm curious, what have your experiences been? Let me know, comment down below. And thank you again to Kenzie for sponsoring today's video. Sophie's really working hard to bring the cuteness to this video, and honestly, she is slaying. Let's dive back in. OK, so let's talk about making an impossible decision. If you've been around on my channel for a moment, you might know this story. But when I was a little 13-year-old, I was a horse girl. Who are we kidding? I still am. And I volunteered at this little barn up the road for my family. I would do anything to be around horses. And one day I had the opportunity to go on a trail ride in this big, huge, miles-long open field with a couple friends from the barn. I borrowed the owner's daughter's horse, which was this gorgeous chestnut x-racing horse mare, thoroughbred named Georgia. I was not a good rider, nor did I really know that much about horses at the time. But it turns out that if you give horses miles of an open field who used to run professionally, they really like going fast. And I wasn't athletically prepared for that. We were galloping across a field. I was terrified because she was going way too fast. And then the horse stumbled. I flew over her right shoulder, blocked out for a second. When I woke up, I was in a ton of pain in my right ankle. And very long story short, it was shattered in a very unique way. And I went from surgery to surgery to surgery over the next 14 years of my life. My entire high school career was pretty much spent on crutches recovering from a surgery or another. And they never went right. My body never healed actually correctly. I was always in pain. I was always looking for a solution that could help. Went through college, started my adult working career, and was still in so much pain with a part of my body that just did not work right. And I remember joking to friends in college, like, I should just chop it off, right? But that idea became much less of a joke in my mid-20s. My ankle continued degrading. There were no good options left. Everything I loved felt like it was kind of slowly being taken away from me the worst the pain got. And I started thinking about this as a very realistic option. I would say in, like, January of 2018, I started kind of considering it. But, like, of course, of course I wouldn't. But, like, what if that was an option? What if that could help? I had one more ankle surgery in March of that year. And I remember going back for my post-surgical follow-up appointment. And my doctor was like, hey, how's everything going? And I was like, it's worse than it was before. Things feel really bad. And his response was like it felt flippant at the time. It was very matter of fact, like, OK, this I've done everything I know how to do. I'm sorry it didn't work. And it was kind of this like, you're stuck with this moment. That is when I began more seriously contemplating this idea. The first thing I did before even seeing surgeons was talk to a counselor consistently. Then I started speaking to doctors, seeing what other options were out there, considering those, even going in that direction. But pretty quickly, I made the decision that amputation was going to be my best option. My surgeons agreed. And on October 11th of 2018, I walked into a hospital up in Denver, said bye to my ankle, went under surgery, and woke up with that alert. So making really hard decisions, what goes into that process, or what went into it for me? When you're talking about life-altering decisions that are going to change the course of everything forever, obviously it's going to be multifaceted. It's not an easy call. But I would argue that oftentimes these decisions are a little bit more simple than we think they are. So in making this choice for myself, the hardest thing was to ask myself what I actually wanted. Now that may be foreign to some people listening, but I was not raised in a culture or an environment that taught me to ever ask, what do you want, Joe? I've always had very deep people pleasing tendencies and I was raised in a conservative Christian background where being in the church, I'm not talking about my family, but specifically in the church, which I was enmeshed in, everything was always about, do everything for everybody else around you. Don't ever think about yourself that's selfish. And so for the first time in my life, when thinking about cutting off my ankle, this is something that was going to massively inconvenience the people around me. But for whatever reason, it was also the first time that I really took a moment to think, okay, obviously I'm not gonna do this because it's gonna inconvenience everybody around me, but if it didn't, if I could really make this decision for myself, which I could, I just didn't realize that yet, what would I do? I thought about the choice as a road forking into two roads, what's that called? Converging is when they come together. Deconverging, a deconverging road, I don't know. Option A was the next ankle surgery, new injections, trying different things, which I had done for 14 years. Option B was cutting my ankle off and living life as an amputee, which was full of so much uncertainty, possibly still a lot of pain, I didn't know. Now neither one of these were roads that I really wanted to walk down. We're on the path we're on sometimes. And when I thought about walking down these two options, option A felt like a dark tunnel descending into a pit. I had such a sick feeling in my stomach, in my body, just hopelessness, nothing I wanted to be a part of. Thinking about it in storybook form, that felt like it was full of like evil monsters who wanted to take my life. Option B, the leg chopping option, also had a lot of monsters on it, right? Like a lot of uncertainty, way more bends in the path that I could not see around. However, I felt like there was at least a glimmer of light that way. Like just, just a little bit of hope, like a chance at seeing the light. And honestly, once I recognized that, which was pretty early on, I knew what my decision was. There were still a lot of factors to work out. But I'm a big believer in the idea that without hope, we die. I think that people need hope, whether that is made up or realistic, we need something to hold on to. And without that, either emotionally, mentally, or sometimes even actually, we die. The dark path of doing the same thing I had always done felt like death to me. And just sitting and listening to my body's reaction to considering these two things and understanding that my gut inclination was not to keep my leg as inconvenient as that would be, that was the single biggest factor in making that choice. Because I think just sitting with our emotions and letting them speak can do a lot more than we think sometimes. I spilled coffee. That's gonna show up on camera, isn't it? Oh well. So the other biggest factor in making this kind of decision was trying my best to separate out my emotions and my logic. Both of these things are very important and I will never tell you not to listen to your emotions because I think, like I just said, those are super-duper important understatement of the century. But when it comes to making these terrible choices, we gotta bring everything in, emotions, rational logic, take a look at the whole playing field and try to separate them out so they don't muddle in with each other. Putting all of my terror and fear and oh my God, could I actually make the decision to lose my leg? Could I live life as an amputee? Would I want that? What does that mean? All of that fear and in some ways, excitement at the possibility of life with less pain, I quieted that for a second and just looked at the facts, right? I knew my ankle was never gonna get better on its own. I knew that the surgical options available to me were just stop-gap options. They could help or a short period of time, they could delay the inevitable. It would mean continuing to live from surgery to surgery and I know that there weren't any good options. The amputation option came with a whole lot of unknown, would the amputation heal? The physical infection risk, the mental health risks, all of it. Thinking just logically, what could most likely give me the better quality of life? It was pretty clear looking at the map that amputation made sense and that was the point at which I sort of reintroduced my emotions and was like, okay, what do we feel about this? Could I handle it? Spoiler alert, you have no idea how you're gonna be able to handle something until you go through it. But consulting-wise sources, surgeons, friends, therapists, really sitting with my emotions and imagining things as two different paths and seeing what sort of story my brain built about those paths and how I felt about it and separating emotions from logic, making a logical decision and then seeing what that felt like. I would say were the biggest factors that helped me make that decision. Now I'm gonna say something, but I'm not sure if it's good advice or not. So please take this with a grain of salt. But I have noticed the few times in my life when I've had to make very difficult decisions. I can think of like three moments in my life where I knew these decisions would change everything forever and take every part of me to get through. Once I felt like I had my answer, like listening to that gut instinct after considering the factors and being like, I know that this is gonna be the best choice. To a large extent, kind of just go into survival mode and do it. Because I think it is so easy to get absolutely paralyzed by indecision, paralyzed by like, what about this factor? What about that factor? And yes, you should absolutely consider all the factors. But once you have your decision, I personally have found it very useful outside of totally new information. Just sort of buckle down and stick to it. We don't like change. It is much easier to stay the course to take the easier options. And sometimes that's totally fine to do, right? But in my experience, my brain and body will fight against the harder choice, even if it is the right one, because it's very uncomfortable, because it's real difficult. And my brain will come up with all kinds of ways to let me get out of it, avoid it, do something easier, even if I know it's not gonna be good for me. And so once I made that decision, it was done. I made that decision. I was going through with it. There wasn't a whole lot of like, waffling on it. In a big way, I think I did sort of shut down the emotions that I was feeling until it was done. Very important to note, don't shut down your emotions and leave them off. I have done that many times in my life and it has led to a lot of therapy and unhealthy coping mechanisms. But to know that I was in survival mode, I was just gonna get through it, do whatever I needed to get to the other side, then feel things and then process the emotions was helpful in just getting through it, right? Like I didn't have the capacity to also feel all the things at the same time. So I didn't, I saved that for later. I knew I was gonna continue in therapy and counseling. I knew that I was going to have things to work through. I just couldn't do it yet. I also think that there's something to be said about making really difficult decisions and just being like, I'm doing it, I'm what may. And understanding that you are going to find a way to survive it, it might not be pretty. It might be the most agonizing thing you've ever been through, but you're gonna find a way to get to the other side. One thing I would say is to trust yourself, to know that you're going to find ways to survive once you have made this difficult choice, whatever that is for you. And oftentimes that might mean that you don't have the tools in your arsenal just yet to be able to deal with it. It's gonna mean developing new ones, asking for help, reaching out, trying new things and that's okay to just sort of commit to that process as something that I have found beneficial in my own life. I think one of the crummy things about life is that very few, if any of us, are gonna make it out unscathed. Like no matter who we are, chances are at some point we're gonna have to make what feels like an impossible decision, we're like 20 of them. I think it's important not to glamorize it or downplay how difficult, how full of grief, how heart-wrenching some choices that we have to make are, but to still be able to make them for ourselves I think is of vital importance and to feel and process everything that comes with that. Like I said in the beginning, I am very proud of the fact that I made this decision, taught me a lot about myself and it empowered me to be able to make really hard decisions again. When I knew it was best for me, when I knew I wasn't in healthy situations and needed to get out, I was able to kind of fall back on the fact that I can do hard things I've done it before and I can do it again and so can you. We don't have to know how, we don't have to know all of the answers, but we can find our way through it often times with the help of others. One of the things that leads to absolute paralysis at least for me is getting too lost in all the details. So I did so much research on like amputation versus other ankle surgeries and just spent hours watching videos and reading articles and like really trying to understand what exactly this would look like for me, but the reality was my answer wasn't gonna be found there. Like it was really important to do all the research, like that is a factor, but at a certain point have all the important information and when you know the decision you wanna make, at least in my case, it was helpful to just make that decision and not keep getting lost in this circle of like what about this, what about this, what about this because I knew that I wasn't gonna have those answers from anyone else. The only way I was gonna know what this was gonna be like for me was to experience it. So I could only make the best decision with the amount of information I had at the time. The last thing that I will say about making hard choices, this is something that at least one therapist, perhaps more has said to me, but you only know what you know when you know it. Super deep, I know. Like it sounds trite, but it's also accurate. There have been times in my life when I felt like I made the wrong decision, not with this, but with like previous things in my life. And there was a lot of self-hatred because like how could I have made that decision when the outcome was this? But the reality was I made the best decision that I could at the time with the information that I had. And then later I got more information that changed how I saw that choice that I made. It made me hate it, which made me hate me, but we can't penalize ourselves for not knowing things when we didn't know them. So if you make some big decision in your life and you hate the outcome or you receive additional information after that choice and it's not good and it feels like everything is fucked up, I would encourage all of ourselves to give ourselves some fricking grace. Life is hard when we make a decision, we do not know what the outcome is going to be. And sometimes it's not what we want it. Sometimes it's pretty damn horrific and extending compassion, I would argue, especially to ourselves in those moments is really important. And that is something that I feel like I have to relearn every couple months because like many of us, I don't struggle showing compassion to other people. I really have a hard time showing up for myself, but the reality is that you, just like me, are deserving of grace and compassion, especially from ourselves when we're people who might be too hard on ourselves. That is it, my darling friends. I am very much looking forward to reading your responses to this video. Does any of this resonate for you? This is not how everyone's gonna make choices. If you're anything like me, maybe some of these hit home a little bit for you. I'd love to hear what has helped you make really difficult decisions because gosh darn it, I can guarantee you I'm gonna have to make more in my life. And I would love any strategies that you have employed in your life. Thank you again to Kenzie for sponsoring today's video. Check out that link down below. A huge thank you to my amazing patrons over on Patreon for your continued generous support and enabling me to make these videos. And you, lovely viewer, watching this right now, thank you so much for spending a few minutes out of your day here with me today. You could be anywhere else in the world doing anything but you chose to hang out with me. And Sophie, Sophie, yeah, you can see Sophie and Sophie. And we really appreciate that. I love you guys, I'm thinking about you and I will see you in the next video. Well, bye guys.