Choice.Such a small word for such a hard thing, right?

Sometimes you can’t help but wonder how much choice you really have in your life.  Can you choose to be happy even when the sadness threatens to crush you?  Can you choose not to hold a grudge when the person who wronged you doesn’t even care they hurt you?  Can you choose to let the past go when sometimes you can’t stop it from completely overwhelming you?

Unfortunately, (and trust me, I was planning on going in the opposite direction with this post, but) the answer is that you can.  I guess I just can’t live in a world where I’m not responsible for my own decisions.  Sometimes, yes, circumstances are completely beyond my control and other people put me in a situation I didn’t want to be in, but I don’t have control over that.  What I can control is how much I whine about it (which can sometimes be a lot), and how I choose to fix it.  Sometimes the person who puts me there is myself.  That’s the hardest, but I can still choose to dig myself out or give up.

And digging yourself out can look like a lot of things.  It can look like:

deciding to take care of yourself, for once

deciding to take care of others, for once

getting out of situation that is slowly draining your spirit

putting yourself into a situation that will make your spirit healthy

going back to school

getting out of school

trying something new

stopping yourself from trying too many new things

I didn’t mean for those to be opposites, but I guess that’s a lesson in itself.  Each person’s life is made of their decisions, and each person’s decisions are as unique as they are; we as outsiders can hardly make judgments based on our inherently patchy knowledge.  Alternatively, if you find someone is judging you, perhaps they are trying to make themselves feel better about a bad choice they’ve made by judging you, or perhaps they simply don’t know enough about the situation; either way, you can choose to let it bother you or be content that you’ve made the right decision for you and the life you have right now.

I guess that’s what it really comes down to: making the best decision for the life you have now and trying to get as close as you can to the life you picture for yourself.   And those aren’t decisions that someone can make for you, despite how much they may want to, or even you may want them to.  In the end, you will have to live with the decisions you make, good or bad, so make them right for you.