Personal

This is your life. It’s what you make of it, it’s what you make it into. Everything that’s bad? You put yourself through. Everything wonderful? You accomplished. Everything enjoyable is yours, everything disgusting, as well. You are your messy house. You are your words. You are your computer, your phone calls, your friends, your clothes, your gorgeous voice, your vanity, your self hate and self love.

You are yourself. You are your life. You chose. You choose. Every morning you wake up, and you decide what you’re going to do. You decide to go to work, you decide to pay the bills, you decide to sing and dance and write and create. You decide to be lazy. You decide to pine, to cry, to stomp your feet. You choose to be a child. You choose to grow up.

You cannot take pieces of it and say they belong to anyone else; they have their own pieces. Here and there, you interact — if you do not want them to hurt you, let them go. They’ll never make you happy that way, either, but that, again, is your choice.

Blah blah metaphor. Blah blah deep meaningful shit.

Forget what you were taught. No one can *make* you do anything you did not choose to do. Maybe you didn’t ‘know’ what would be the consequences of your actions, but when the hell has that ever been an excuse?

Gun to your head in an alley? Why’d you go walking there? Fall down a flight of stairs? Why weren’t you more careful with what you do to your body? Heart disease at age 30? The drinking and smoking have a lot to do with that, you know. Wife leave you? Why’d you marry her?

You are not a victim of the world. It doesn’t exist to torment you. It owes you nothing.

You are responsible for your life. For every mistake you make. Your mother, father, mentor, best friend, lover, son, daughter, archnemesis, some stranger on the street may be added to the equation, but each and every choice you make is yours and yours alone. Do not blame society’s norms and mores; do not blame the world.

You live in it, but you were born alone, and ultimately, you will die alone. You have no one to answer to, but yourself.

What this means is not desperation, fear and shame. What this means is power.

You are wholly responsible for your own joy, your own satisfaction. Stop waiting for life to apologize for the shit it’s put you through. It didn’t. You did. Knowing or unknowing, and ignorance has never been, and never will be, an excuse. And anyway, life can’t apologize. It doesn’t even know you’re there. But you do.

Stop dreaming. Start doing.

Be proud of it, or give it all up.

Your choice.

So choose.

About Catastrophe Jones

Wretched word-goblin with enough interests that they're not particularly awesome at any of them. Terrible self-esteem and yet prone to hilarious bouts of hubris. Full of the worst flavors of self-awareness. Owns far too many craft supplies. Will sing to you at the slightest provocation.
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