What it all boils down to is that everything is a choice. This is actually good news, even though it sounds heavy and awful if you’ve been beaten over the head with “hard truths” to any significant degree. It’s good news because, though it may not seem like it, you can choose to survive, and you can actually enjoy it. It may not feel like it, but you can. You may not believe it, but you can.
For the longest time, it seemed to me that I was only ever really able to choose the wrong things. When I tried to choose the right things there was only ever this overwhelming desire to do the wrong things present with me. I hated what was happening to my life because of these bad choices. I really, really hated it. But I still kept choosing the wrong things, and it seemed for all the world like I couln’t stop.
Looking back, I don’t think I actually could stop. It wasn’t that I literally couldn’t, mind you. For all intents and purposes, though, I couldn’t.
You see, starting sometime around ten years ago, everything I thought and felt, and everything I did was, in some way, a reaction to pain. It’s complicated, and hard to explain, but the sad fact of the matter is that, for a whole decade, while my entire existence was basically defined by this one, perpetual reaction to pain, the main thing that I was doing was to cause others pain, too. I am not going to sit here and pretend that I fully comprehend each and every detail of life’s deepest mysteries, but I am going to go out on a limb here and just speculate that there might perhaps have been some sort of axiomatic truth in play throughout all of it.
There came a point, though, where I found that I had to make a choice in the opposite direction. The pain of staying the same actually became greater than the pain of changing, and for a week I white knuckled it. I spent most of it crying. Then some things happened, and it all flipped around. The whole thing just switched.
It wasn’t like change became easy. I was still climbing uphill. But the crazy thing about it was that I suddenly found myself genuinely wanting to climb up that hill. Change ceased to become something that I felt like I had to do or else, and it had begun to become the one thing that I wanted more than anything else in the whole world.
This blog is the story of how I ended up being able to choose the right things for the right reasons. I hope you enjoy it. I hope it helps someone out there. That is basically all.
