So I’m sitting here in my recliner, rocking baby Mae back to sleep for the third time tonight. Like I often do when I’m immobilized in a chair in a dark room, I took out my phone and started browsing Facebook.
Like most people who have ever spent even the tiniest bit of time on the site, I have a love/hate relationship with it. I love catching up with people. I love sharing photos; I spam blog posts to unsuspecting friends and acquaintances.
But then there’s the obvious downside to Facebook – the shallow relationships, the carefully cultivated and frequently misleading personas, the blurring of public and private, intimate and social.
Today though, I was blessed with a positive revelation. As I was scrolling through my newsfeed, I realized how similar most of the people in my feed are – middle class, thirty-something, well educated, Christian, suburban parents and professionals. There are some exceptions, but those are far, far fewer than you might guess.
But then I looked a bit closer. I looked at what these people were choosing to write about. There were posts about children, and science, religion and global warming, marathons, national parks, and littering to name a few. Some posts were personal, some were humerus, some were earnest and some obnoxious .
It made me realize how we can come from such similar places and go on such similar paths and yet live lives that are truly unique in the most amazing ways.
I’ve never really kept it a secret that I’ve been in therapy for anxiety for years. I’ve seen multiple doctors with various techniques at various times in my life. Through out it all, though, there has been one concept that always alluded me – the concept of owning my own decisions. Of deciding for myself. Of avoiding comparison and the need for validation. Of being secure and confident in my right to be unique.
i guess when it came down to it, making up my own mind felt arrogant. Like I knew better. And perhaps that’s tied in with a moral weight I always felt, a belief that in most matters, there is a right and a wrong, a good and a bad.
But scrolling through Facebook tonight, I started to realize that most of our decisions aren’t about what we should do but rather about what we choose to do. Life isn’t a battle to run the straightest line; it’s an open book that we are meant to write.
It’s hard for me to let go of that, to take ownership over what I had previously dedicated towards the norm, but when we are able to view our lives as our own and we are able to break away from believing most choices contain shoulds, then perhaps we can find the freedom to use our lives to create a rich and unique tapestry that only we ourselves are able to create.