Choice and Accountability

Solidly in the latter part of my thirties, I feel maybe it’s time to tackle this subject.  Growing up in an LDS home, there is an organization for the girls ages 12-18 referred to as Young Women.  The spiritual study is rooted in the Young Women Values.  They are:  Faith, Divine Nature, Individual Worth, Knowledge, Choice and Accountability, Good Works, Integrity, and Virtue.  They are values taught to help build the foundation of what will become a good woman, wife, mother, friend, and sister.  Now, I have not been an active participant in any organized religion for going on 20 years.  However, those roots were planted young and many of them remain today despite routine church attendance.  The one value that has always struck strongly with me is Choice and Accountability. 

Honestly, when I was a kid, those words were just recited every Sunday.  They weren’t verbs until I grew up and acknowledged how truly important those characteristics to me in those with whom I interact and bond with.  When you look at that short list, it seems pretty simple to see why LDS young girls are taught about these attributes.  It is a list of values that when truly applied to as much of a person’s erred life, can really have a lot of joy and success.  Choice and accountability, for me, should be listed last.  When you evaluate the choices you’ve made in your day, are you including your personal responsibility in those actions?

Have you ever considered how many actions have been taken in your lives that were truly a choice?  We often tell ourselves, “I had to.”  How true is that when you break down some raw and honest truth?  There are absolutely things that happen to us.  Without debate from me, I will agree that shit truly happens.  We can’t control the choices others take.  We can’t control a weather system.  We can’t control the literal acts of God that take place.  But…here’s the big but:  We choose how it impacts our lives.  So, when you break things down, life is literally the consequences of choice after choice after choice.

These days, there seems to be a lot of reasons why a person can’t or can do something.  There is a magical force, apparently, that removes all choice from a lot of people.  It’s weird for me to witness.  When a person says, “I can’t stop being angry because of whatever…” I am hearing one thing.  “I am making a decision to stay angry.”  Is it hard to control the way our emotional and complicated minds and hearts do?  Absolutely!  It’s sometimes the hardest thing in the world to control the emotions.  There is an entire industry of pharmaceuticals dedicated to helping that issue.  I will admit that there are chemical imbalances that literally take away an individuals ability to control certain things.  Those are the circumstances that won’t apply to my philosophy.

We are very quick to justify the outcomes of an individual based on where they come from.  The neighborhood they grew up, the way their parents treated them, the quality of their education, the amount of income and lifestyle they had, etc. all contribute to what a person becomes in their adulthood.  It’s almost like a predisposition damning or exalting a person.  I don’t believe that at all.  Because, at some point in a person’s life, they have the ability to choose the path they want to be on. 

I was sexually molested when I was 10 years old.  It changed me.  A lot.  At a very young age I was introduced to a context of relationships I was not mature enough to comprehend.  It required some therapy.  There have been times I wish I had stayed in therapy for a while longer than I did.  During the same timeframe of the assault, I was living in a home with a very abusive father.  Feeling safe was something I lost at a very young age.  It forced me to figure out how to self-preserve young.  Why that was the way I reacted to such trauma I believe is a nature element of who I am.  Resiliency is something I have always had.

My grades didn’t ever suffer.  There was never any outside evidence that I had gone through some pretty ugly stuff before I was even 14 years old.  People on the outside looking in on my life didn’t see any kind of distress.  I had a lot of friends.  I had a good character.  I didn’t act out or misbehave any significant way to indicate a kid in pain or suffering.  My faith in my religion remained strong and probably a contributing factor to my resilience. 

Only those very close to me have ever even known these truths about me.  The art of the façade is also a trait I have grown to really know.  I have put myself together for the masses and pushed towards whatever I was pushing towards.  Many times I had no idea where I was going, but it was at least some form of forward.

I have a long list of reasons why I should not be successful.  There are hours of stories to justify a severe mental break in which I never recover.  When I was 28 years old and held a lifeless baby in my hands, the pivot of my path headed straight for that fate.  It wasn’t until I went to a therapist, after terrifying thoughts of suicide, that I figured it all out.  I had made a choice at a point in my life and that current state of my mental faculties was the accountability I violently faced.

I walked out of that therapy office with the decision to take control of my emotions and NEVER let them get control of me again.  I did a major overhaul on my perspective.  It took me a few more years to get ultimately in the place I needed and wanted to be.  I would say about five years after that moment, was when I could say that I had successfully established a realistic grip on the fact that the way I reacted to situations was solely on my shoulders.

I have not become immune to crap situations.  I still get into circumstances that make me frustrated and upset.  But, the choices I make in reaction to my interactions with the world are thought out with the accountability attached.  Meaning, I make every effort to not make a decision without being willing to accept the consequences fully of my actions. If I use angry words, I accept the outcome of those words.  If I get hurt, I choose how long I am willing to allow that pain to resonate and what I permit it to affect.

At no point in my adult life, have I thought about letting the bad things that have happened to me control me.  They happened.  They have hurt.  They have healed.  They have shaped who I am but not defined who I am.  The definition of who I am is directly related to the choices I make and the accountability I take in those choices.  Who I am is not where I came from.  I don’t use those shit situations as an excuse to behave badly or stop pursuing my self-satisfaction.

It sucks that it took me so many years to figure out just how much power the choices I make have on so much.  The reason I felt compelled to share this now, is that I see a lot of people thinking they don’t have the ability to make their life better because they are still choosing to hold onto the pain.  If you’re one of those people, step back and really investigate the importance of the power you are allowing to give up to past mistakes, poor decisions, people who have hurt you, or bad things that have happened to you.  Make the apologies you need to.  Give the forgiveness to whomever or whatever has offended you.  Take the necessary accountability to repair damage you have done so you can forgive yourself.

No real success story is without challenge.  Choose to stop being angry, sad, depressed, lonely, afraid, etc.  Choose to not be your mother or father.  Choose to educate yourself.  Choose to be the best version of yourself you can possibly be.  Choose to change a predetermined idea of who you think you are or should be.  You are the only one who can make those choices.  Make the choices that defy stereotypes.