Deciding the right choice to make

Making an important decision in life is something that everyone has to go through at some point in their lives. It could be something like choosing a school, choosing the right major to study, choosing a long time occupation, moving to a new country/place, getting married or even having a child. In Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, Gan, the main character, has to make a very difficult choice that for some people might not seem like a choice at all, but for me, he is choosing what to do, even if his ultimate decision is obvious to some of us.  Gan’s desicion relies on whether or not he wants to carry  T’Gatoi’s children, the Tlic.

He had been practically okay with this because he had known all his life that he would be the one to carry T’Gatoi’s Tlic. However, things changed when he saw everything that could go wrong if he got impregnated with the Tlics when he had to witness Lomas being ripped open, as he tells his brother in page 19: “I had … never seen a person cut open before.” After he experienced this, he was left with a lot of insecurities that made him doubt if he really wanted to end up like Lomas, in the worst case scenario. He knew his brother Qui did not want to do it because he had experienced something similar to him at a younger age, but his sister Hoa had always wanted it and T’Gatoi would choose her if he refused to accept it. Like he states in page 21: “No. Shed’d take Xuan Hoa. Hoa … wants it”, then he thought: “She wouldn’t if she had stayed to watch Lomas.” When he realized this, he immediately felt like it was his obligation to protect his sister from what he now knew was not like the diagrams he was shown when he was younger.

I faced the most important decision in my life so far when I was only 15 years old. I had to choose between staying with my mom in my home country, Cuba, or come to the United States of America to live with my almost stranger dad. Luckily, I was confronting this situation with my brother, who’s 2 years older than me. I had verely any memories of my dad since he and my mom got divorced when I was 4 years old and I rarely saw him back then. In Cuba, it was and still is very difficult to move out if the country. It was kind of a miracle that me and my brother, both underage, received the opportunity to do it because my dad who had got out because of a medical mission to Venezuela, migrated to the U.S. from there and then never came back, claimed us. Many people might say that we really had no choice, and I thought that too back then. But now that I think about it, I really did have a choice. I could have stayed with my mother, who raised me my whole life or I could actually have a bright future ahead of me in a new country. There was also the fact that I knew nothing in English and it was going to be an even greater challenge to learn a completely new language from scratch, but at the same time being bilingual is a great advantage to have in life. Those were the risks and rewards of my decision.

The decisions we make in life will not always be made lightly, like when Goa says: “Qui goaded me into deciding to do something. It didn’t turn out very well” on page 24 referring to the fight he and his brother had. There will be a lot of confrontations and a lot of doubts about what the right choice to make is, but we should answer this question in our minds first: Do we want to do it for ourselves or does it involve someone else we care about? In this case, Gan did it for both reasons because he wanted to protect his sister and at the same time he wanted to keep T’Gatoi for himself because deep within himself he knew that he loved them both. In my case, I came to the United States for myself and for my future, even though it hurt me to leave my mom, my family and my friends behind. Sometimes to make the right choice we have to risk a lot.

Finding the right answer to our problems is not easy, but taking into consideration what is at stake can lighten up a big portion of its waight and make it a little bit easier for us to decide.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.