Lately I have been thinking about choices, mostly because it has been difficult for me to make one. The word options has also come to mind, along with the thought that once I make this choice my other options disappear rather quickly…or do they? But mostly I think about choices and the bad ones I have made over the course of my 25 years (almost 26). I speak, for the most part, about the ones that I have made over the past 5 years, the ones that really matter. For instance: what career path am I choosing…do I continue my education…what men should I date or not date…what friends do I keep in my life…what should I be putting on/in my body or not putting on/in my body? These are very broad questions and they sound almost stupid but these questions are my reality and have been my reality for the past 5 years. It’s weed out time but I still have time. Time to figure out what to do with my life.
I love to think about choices because they encompass everything that you do. Why have I made some of the choices I have made in my life? What if it was meant to happen this way? Your choices both good and bad are necessary, a sort of necessary evil that has shaped you into the person you are today and you are better for it. This is an incredibly positive way to think and now I feel that I don’t know who is writing this post. It must be someone else. Me? Positive? Not these days. In fact, far from it.
But what if all of this misery that I feel and the unhappiness of the everyday is meant to drive me, push me forward in a way to a place that I am supposed to be? I know my writing is better the more unhappy I am, in that case, the unhappiness drives me. But then, wouldn’t one have to believe in a grand design to all things big and small? I guess maybe I do believe that. I desperately want to believe that. After all, I am finally able to reach momentary happiness while I sit and write and express myself. I know I was supposed to make all of these ridiculous mistakes and turn down great opportunities to career paths that I may have been programmed to want, at no one’s fault but my own. But why do I still cry almost every day over lost opportunity? It comes back to choices. Once you make one choice, the other’s fade away but I cry as if all opportunity is lost. And it isn’t.
I am trying to learn to live positively, taking all the good with the bad but it’s so difficult when the mind has been beaten down and smashed in for so long over conscious, perhaps even unconscious choices of where to go and who to go there with and why.
One day I know, these choices will get easier and make more sense. Perhaps in hindsight.
Taryn's Turn Nyc 