The Pursuit of Happiness: You Have a Choice

EVERY day you get to:

Complain or be grateful.

Follow the world or your heart.

Blame others or work on yourself.

Feed your fears or your dreams.

Speak badly of others or bless them.

Give up or keep trying.

Think of the worst or the best.

Offer blame and shame, or guilt or grace.

Worry about tomorrow and relive yesterday or choose to be fully alive in this moment.

I saw this post on @​kyrarecoverycoaching​‘s Instagram page and I immediately grabbed a screenshot. These words resonated with me. They embody how I want to live my life.

In the past, I’ve had a propensity towards doom and gloom. I’ve gotten lost in despair. These words offer hope. I decided I need to memorize them, or at the very least put them somewhere where I’ll be reminded of them every day.

I copied the words on a sticky note, added a couple of additional lines that meant something to me (the last two lines above), and placed the sticky note on my calendar so I would be sure to keep this message of choice front and center.

I love the idea of having a choice.

I love this reminder that I hold the power to choose my attitude, my frame of mind, to shape my disposition, and my outlook on life.

I have a choice.

You have a choice.

We have a choice. (I feel like Oprah handing out prizes.)

I’ve been up close and personal with anxiety and depression many times over my last fifty-one years.

Anxiety wants me to believe there is only one right choice and depression wants me to believe there is no choice. Becoming a single teen mom at the tender age of sixteen and knowing I let loved ones down brought me to a place where I got lost in numerous thoughts and choices, afraid to settle on one.

It didn’t help that everyone else had their own ideas on what I should do and what I shouldn’t do. I swung widely towards anxiety, until the overwhelm became too much and I settled into depression. I believed it when they told me my life would never be the same, which led to more anxiety.

It turns out that they were right, in a way: my life never was the same. But with the hindsight and wisdom of time, I’m so glad I made the choices I did, and for the ways in which my life changed.

We hold the power, the strength, and the agency to decide who we want to be each and every day of our lives. We hold the power, the strength, and the agency to decide how we want to show up to the chaos and the beauty of our lives. We hold the power, and it lives in our choices.

As a little girl, I remember visiting my Granny for holidays and special occasions. I looked forward to seeing her and my cousins and aunts and uncles, to the egg hunts and gift exchanges, and to the long table we all gathered around for some traditional dishes.

I also remember what I didn’t look forward to and didn’t have words for until I got older: how sad, lonely, tired, and depressed my Granny always seemed. I absolutely loved it when she got tickled and her eyes squinted and her belly jiggled as she laughed. I absolutely loved it when she smiled and talked. But what I didn’t love, what is still etched in my memory is what she always said when we left: “I might not be here (alive) next Easter … Christmas … Thanksgiving.” The weight of her fear and sadness robbed the room of all the joy and laughter we had experienced that day.

I’m an advocate for grace – for letting everyone have their own experience in their own way, but I still wish there had been more giggles and smiles for my Granny.

We get to decide how we want to feel, and we get to eagerly work towards the mindset that helps us live in the abundance of that feeling. It’s not easy. It takes work to rewire our neural pathways, but we can do it if we choose.

We can continue to choose fear, a scarcity mindset, resistance, other people’s expectations and assumptions about who we should be and what we should do, OR we can choose hope, joy, abundance, and a belief in our ability to figure out how to align our vision with the life we desire and the person we want to be.

I’m not endorsing toxic positivity or denying the fact that life can be freaking hard. I am championing giving ourselves permission to feel what we are feeling and to still make a choice about how we want to show up each day. And yes, there are days (notice the plural here) when we need to show up to the couch in our pj’s with a box of tissue and honor the pain we need to process. Hell, there are whole seasons, it would seem, when the couch and that box of tissue would serve us well. But only if that is our intentional choice.

Listen to your body, trust you know what you need, and choose how you will show up each day – each moment – with your own hard-earned experience and inner insight.

This is your one beautiful life, and you get to choose what you will experience and how you will greet each and every day.