We often act like madmen who’re eagerly bent on self-destruction

I wasn’t prepared for what Catherine was about to tell me.

“I’m going to try to get pregnant next week,” she blurted out without any context.

Catherine just turned 19 years old. She still lives at home with a controlling mother. Her father killed himself when she was young. She doesn’t yet know how to drive and has to beg for rides to and from a menial job. She’s never had any romantic relationships, but she’s recently started slipping away from home to meet men for sex.

Just last week, she told me about how one such man — who she met online — picked her up and took her to a camper about an hour away from her. (She told her mother she was at a friend’s house.) They had sex for a couple of days, then he abruptly brought her back home — and then he disappeared from her life.

Now, she’s met another man online and she plans to meet him Sunday night. She’s never seen him in real life, but she’s planning to make sure he gets her pregnant. And she looked shocked when I told her that this plan was stupid and selfish.

When I told Catherine that this was the most selfish thing she had ever told me, she looked as though I’d just slapped her.

“But I want a baby,” she said. “I want someone to love me.”

I explained all the reasons it was a terrible idea, but I told her the worst of it was that it would be a selfish decision — and it would be setting a child up to have a life much like the one she hates right now.

For several minutes, she just kept saying, “But I want a baby,” as though I hadn’t understood the first time. After another 10 minutes of discussion, she finally admitted that she understood what I was saying and knew I was right.

“You’re not wrong about any of this,” she said. “I just hadn’t thought about it that way. But I know what I want and that would give me someone to love me.”

A little while later Saturday evening, I was talking with another friend and I told her about my disturbing conversation with Catherine. This woman has three children and has gone through one heartache after another. I already knew she had had a difficult life, but she proceeded to tell me other stories about things she had done — mistakes she had made.

As we talked, all I could do was think about my own terrible decisions.

I like to think I would have made a lot of decisions differently if I could go back to my 20s and 30s to relive parts of my life. I would have made different career decisions. I would have made different romantic decisions. I tell myself that my life would be entirely different — and far better — if I could go back and make all the right decisions this time.

But when I’m honest with myself, I realize that I’m human enough that I might have made the same decisions again even if I could live those years over again. (After all, I thought I was right each time.) Or I might have found entirely different ways to lead myself away from the happiness and loving life that I want.

If Catherine gets pregnant — next week or any other time — with the current circumstances in her life, the outcome probably won’t be what she wants. But in five years, she might be thinking of entirely different mistakes. She might be inventing new ways to sabotage herself.

When we’re happy with how something in our lives turned out, we like to think we’re smart and wise people. But when things go wrong, we’re eager to find some way to blame others. Even if we should know better, we hate to admit that we’ve usually created the results we’re getting.

I never made the mistake that Catherine is thinking about making. I never made the mistakes that my other friend told me about this evening. But I’ve made my own mistakes, over and over and over again.

The truth is that we are our own worst enemies. Even though bad things can happen to us that we didn’t cause — disease, accidents and more — the truth is that most of what we have is because of our decisions or lack of willingness to make decisions. Our decisions and our actions are the cause of what most of us hate in our lives.

It’s easy for me to look at Catherine and feel superior to her. I wouldn’t ever do what she said she’s going to do. I’m smarter than that. I’m wiser than that. Right?

I like to think so, but I’m not.

I can be just as blind. I can be just as stupid. Just as unwise. I can be the agent of my own self-destruction, even when I want to redirect my rage and find others to blame.

The truth is that I’m hopelessly human. And so are you. We are our own worst enemies.