Don’t Just Choose for Yourself, Choose Yourself

I had a conversation with a good friend recently that took me down the rabbit hole of choosing for ourselves again.  Except this time, I focused on one of the more powerful choices we can make in life: choosing ourselves.

So many layers to this, but the train of thought took me somewhere specific.

We spend our whole lives waiting to be chosen, then Death chooses us, and I can only imagine that choice being the one choice we really weren’t really looking forward to.

We wait to be chosen from the time we are but wee humans assembling in our first classrooms.  It start there and pretty much continues on through adulthood.  We wait to be called upon in class.  We wait to be selected for a dodgeball team in gym.  We wait to be asked to Homecoming or Prom or even out on a date.  We wait for acceptance letters from colleges.  We wait for callbacks to auditions.  We wait for job offers.  We wait for promotions.  We wait for new career opportunities.  We wait to be rated by a boss who may or may not have a clue about how good you are or are not at your job.  We wait for the voting results on American Idol.  We wait to see if our constituents will elect us to office.  We wait and wait and wait.  During all that waiting, somebody else is choosing.

Here’s the novel idea: choose yourself.  Don’t wait to be chosen.  Don’t rely on the external validation.  Trust me, I get it: validation from others feels good.  It’s another one of those things built into the Human System.  We can’t help ourselves.  What we can do is choose to override the programming, at least partially.  We can minimize it.  We can take the very difficult but very important step of choosing ourselves.

For fuck’s sake, nobody else is going to choose you.  If they do, it’s because choosing you serves their purpose.  Nothing wrong with that, really, because we all do it to one extent or another.  The crime is when we hang all of our hopes and dreams, the possibilities for our wonderful future, on the choices of other people.  It’s crazy.  Really, really crazy.

Don’t just choose for yourself, my dear, dear fellow human being.  Choose yourself.  Can you try that?