It's Not Your Life

This past week, I heard from another of my friends. She was empathizing with me and saying, ‘I know your life isn’t your own right now.’ And while I knew exactly where she was coming from, that she was in fact saying to me “Hang in there. Life will get better!”, it didn’t sit at all well with me. Why is that, I wondered? And so I spent the next little while mulling it over in my mind.

Like most, if not all of us, I like to think I am in control of my life, at least to some extent, some of the time. […lol…] I like to think that I make the decisions as to how I respond to the things happening around me. But have I ever thought that my life is my own to do with what I wanted? As a daughter, a wife, a mother, a caregiver, as a woman, that concept seems foreign to my lived experience. So what exactly did it mean?

I’m not at all sure that life is meant to be lived for oneself? That seems like something that would soon become boring and devoid of meaning. I believe we were put on this earth with other people in order to be of use to those wth whom we share our life, our country, our planet. We were not put here to be takers only, but rather to add whatever we can to the better good of all.

Your life, or mine, is always our own. It is our own to do what we will with. We are free to use it however we feel is best. While what we do with that life may not be what we would really like to be doing, it is still a choice we make every day. Sometimes it is necessary to ‘get out of our own way’ in order to make that choice, a choice that should always resonate with our OWN core beliefs whatever they may be, not someone else’s, not society’s.

So, I would argue with my friend that YES, my life is my own right now, my own to do with what I want, to be where I want, to follow the path that I have chosen.

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NUDGINGS: a journey into the unknown

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