Misery is a Choice
When people used to say this kind of thing to me, I genuinely thought they were crazy. Who the hell is choosing to have the cavalcade of shit I’d waded through?
I thought anyone reasonable would agree that cursed laundry list was a great reason to be miserable. When people told me misery was a choice, I thought they were telling me everything was my fault: I had chosen to have a horrible life, I had chosen to be the kind of person who has that life, I had chosen to keep having that life, and somehow no one else was responsible for any of it but me.
The interesting thing I’ve learned over time is that those two things are unrelated, the emotion of misery and the circumstances around me. The rest—the question of whose fault it is or was—is used to dictate how I should feel about circumstances. If it was my fault, then I should be miserable. If it wasn’t my fault, someone else should be miserable, and it was my job to figure out who to share the misery with.
The question of responsibility, the question of whose fault it is, is pointless noise. It simply does not matter. Once something has happened, we can’t do a damn thing about it, and trying to determine how to feel after the fact by who can be blamed for something is a useless activity. We cling to something that happened in order to insulate ourselves from the future by hiding in the past, and neither are the way we think they are.
Oh, if I had only noticed the right signs, I could have prevented these things from happening. I’d better cling to my memories so I can identify that kind of person again.
And yet, I could never quite get it right. I could never quite remember the past well enough to prevent a future from happening.
The past and future are quite literally imaginary.
Joy, as Anaisa might say it, is in now. In fact, now is the only place joy can be found. The will to live in the now involves work with the spirit, to peel away our illusory past and imaginary future, but Papa is right.
Misery is the choice to cling to our imagination, looking for whose fault it is that something happened to us. It’s often the only choice we know how to make.
