I can get lost in a library.

Even if I’m only after one particular book, I somehow come out with 10.

Case in point: Last night, in an effort not to spend $35 on the hard-back version of a new release I’ve been dying to get my hands on, I wandered into my local library in the hopes they could save me some $$$. Since I didn’t remember the author’s name (and the line at the Help Desk was a mile long), I decided to take it to the shelves myself. Armed with only a title, I didn’t really have much to go on except a determined look and a winning smile.

By the time I made it to the letter “K”, I had 12 books in hand—none of which were the one I’d gone looking for. I had the books arranged in my arms in such a way that if I so much as blinked in the wrong direction, the tower would come tumbling down.

I was also starting to get a lot of stares. “So what?!?” I asked the guy in ‘Self Help’ who was staring at me … “I like to read.”

But the truth is, my large stack was not so much about my great love for reading. I just have a hard time making a decision. I’ll walk around the library with 12 books because I can’t decide on the one I want to take home. What if I get it home and this book is boring? What if at midnight on Thursday next week I decide I should’ve checked out the other book I had in my hand? These are the questions that haunt me, replaying over and over again as I wander from aisle to aisle.

And it’s not just at the library that I have this problem … I do the same thing when I’m shopping—for anything. I’ll carry around 7 white shirts that all look the same because I can’t decide which one I want to buy. The same questions begin to circulate in my mind: What if I get this shirt home and I don’t like it? What if it doesn’t fit me as well as I thought it would? What if the other shirt I almost bought would’ve looked better with this pair of jeans?

Though I try to convince myself this is just “smart shopping”, the bottom line is that I really just have an issue with commitment.

Because in a world filled with way too many choices, I find it hard to make a choice at all.

Can anyone else relate?

I ended up leaving the library with only one book … having re-shelved all the others in the exact locations I took them from (why should I expect a poor librarian to re-shelve my inability to commit?) There’s a good chance I’ll re-think my book choice next Thursday at 8:00 p.m., but at least I walked away having learned a little more about myself in the process …

even if I never did find the book I went in there looking for in the first place.