Once upon a time, I said I had no choice. I had no choice but the direction available which was to be on the path of emotional turmoil, chaos, and misery. I refused to take the blame for where my life was heading but you don’t know better until you learn differently.
It wasn’t until my son was diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder that has a high chance of fatality, that I realized that I have a choice in everything.
I had a choice to keep being the victim to the stories I told myself, or I could face myself and own up to my own responsibilities and actions.
And every day there is a choice to be made. Be willing to experience groundhog day over and over again and resign that your life will never be different.
Or make the choice to refuse to continue to exist in the programming you’ve known up until now and decide to have a different kind of life.
The kind of life you have is the life you choose. You cannot blame anyone for how your life ends up.
Ever since my son’s medical journey, I have not had a “case of the Mondays” because I choose to not be miserable. Every morning you get to decide to be happy or have a crap day. If you live a hectic life, that’s because you choose to be busy. No one can force a kind of life upon you, not even your boss. But know that every choice also has its consequence.
Always being busy and not taking time out makes you miss out on some really cool moments.
You could choose to be healthy and live up to that choice, everything that follows is about being disciplined. Being disciplined means that you put in the effort to attain and maintain a healthy body. Eat right, exercise right, sleep right, and live right.
You could choose a different career which may mean late nights of studying if it requires you to go back to school.
You could choose to start a business and that too may mean late nights and working weekends until it becomes self-sustaining.
Every choice entails a consequence, so you have to live up to your choices. And in this, you will face a lot of stories you tell yourself that get in the way of making it happen.
In my journey, I had to reframe from being a foster kid reject to being a foster kid success. It took uncovering all the reasons why that is true and why the other is a false narrative I repeated over and over and couldn’t figure out why my life was so hard. When I embraced being a success story things shifted – not all at once but over time.
You have always a choice, what is your choice today?