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Saturday 22 May 2010

Choice


Well, it's been a weird few days (good-weird. But weird all the same). I had a sort of personal epiphany on Saturday. I was in bed, reading books and drinking coffee with the sun streaming through the windows (at last! sun! This Winter has been loooong) and thinking about a decision I have recently made which I wasn't AT ALL sure about, and suddenly this little voice spoke in my ear: you have a choice.

This may not seem so revelatory; it's a thought I've had many times before in one sense or another, but always in a passive way. I could go somewhere or not go somewhere, for example; I could wear the green dress or the red dress, etc. But this time it was like being hit by lightning. It went right to my core. And I thought, all excited, I get to make every decision I want! I can choose what I want to do or say or think! I get to choose! (Again, this may not seem like a particularly blinding realisation, but bear with me).

I had an eating problem for the longest time. And mostly, it's resolved now. But even so, when I'm feeling stressed, or rejected, or just downright fat, it rears its ugly head to say, 'well. We know how to solve this, don't we? Just stop with the eating for a while'. Lately, while agonising over the decision I wasn't sure about, that ugly little head has been rearing up quite frequently. And so this idea of choice, when it arose, really excited me. I realised, all of a sudden, that I don't have to choose to give in to those little relapses. I can choose instead eat something, to fuel the body that I need to be healthy so that I can go to places and do things instead of having to lie around, listless and pale as wax. And this idea of choice being a core thing, something that applies to the hugest things in my life as well as whether to buy the cherry lipgloss or the grape lipgloss, just stunned me.

And ever since, I have been walking around with a big smile on my face. Even yesterday, when some work-stuff went awry and I felt myself sliding into oh-no-everything's-going-wrong territory, I chose (chose) to stop and take a second to think about things instead. And then I chose to smile anyway, because I could either feel stressed and then probably work inefficiently as a result (I tend to flap like a baby bird out of the nest when I'm flustered) which would only lead to more stress, or I could think, well, what has happened has happened. How am I going to fix that?

And that is what I did.

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