I wrote this on scraps of paper about a month ago at work. I know you don’t want to hear my excuses, but I lost the first page. Now I have to rely on my memory to come up with something that works with the other three pages. It’s weird because this is what I’ve been avoiding for a while, having to confront my mind and have an honest conversation with myself. You remember this blog started as a public journal. These days, I no longer want to be vulnerable. I don’t want to be held accountable for my choices, so I ran away. I’m still running, but I’ve kind of run out of energy.

Now I need to write them down clearly. Maybe it’ll help, and I can stop running. On that note, the first page… I think it started with a quote I heard from a favorite show of mine. It says: “Things can go wrong anyway. In whatever choice you make, you might as well do what you want.” I know we all struggle with this, scared of the potential consequences of our different choices and so, we end up choosing the safest option. The one with the least amount of risk, even if it’s not what we want. It’s like when someone told me that it’s better to cry in a Mercedes than to cry on the streets.

As someone who’s had a version of crying in both, I can tell you that tears are just tears. There’s no such thing as bougie or street tears, it’s either you feel pain, or you don’t. My memory has started to turn on its own wheel, so let’s go back to the quote and the other three pages. I never liked mathematics, I still don’t, but there’s an aspect of it that constantly applies to our lives, and it’s hard to ignore. It’s called probability. It amazes me how a formula can predict what is and what could be. That’s one of the things we constantly engage in: we look at our past, our present, and the choices laid out before us to determine a favorable future.

We succeed at some, fail at others, and wonder what could have happened if we’d made a different choice at a certain point. While it’s in our best interest to plan for the future, we somehow turn into our own bad managers, micromanaging the details of our lives. We become rigid and stuck on how we want it to turn out. And when it doesn’t, we feel like we’ve failed. If only we truly understood what it means to be responsible for our lives.

Somehow, responsibility is only taken when things work in our favor. We boldly tell everyone that it was our choice that led to the outcome. But the moment things go off course, we blame everyone and everything else but ourselves. While I understand that there are times when people genuinely don’t have a choice, the ratio of those moments to the ones when we do is almost negligible. So, why has responsibility become so one-sided? I thought about it for a while and arrived at this conclusion:

You and I are aware of how powerless we are against the tides of life. We know disaster can strike at any time without notice, ruining all our plans and the perfect picture we paint for our lives. Because of this constant darkness looming, we play responsibility only one way. We make choices that don’t put us at risk, even if they’re not what we want. So, I’ll tell you the quote again in my revised version: Since things can go wrong anyway, I’ll do what I want. I’ll choose to own my choices, whether they turn out good or bad, because I’d rather try and win than fail altogether by not trying.

Song of the moment- 30 for 30 by Sza & Kendrick Lamar

I’m grateful to be worth your time, and I hope you’re well❤️