The Courage to Choose

The Courage to Choose

Imagine you’re 5-years-old again. You’ve just completed your best-ever pillow fort in the living room and you’re all nestled in with your favourite toys. You’re as content as can be. Life is good, and you never want to leave this amazing little sanctuary.

Then your mom shouts from the other room, “Time to get ready! Everyone put on their coats and shoes! Let’s go!” Apparently, it’s time to go to grandma’s house for a family dinner.

Your breath catches in your throat as you gasp at this horrible news. Your face flushes with rage. Your perfect little world has been intruded upon. It feels like everything is crashing down around you. How can she do this to you? It’s so unfair! What about your fort? You’re right in the middle of playing! Grandma’s house is far. It means a long boring car ride sitting next to your bratty sister. And then listening to a bunch of grownups talk about dumb grownup stuff while eating a gross dinner because grandma never makes anything you like. This is a disaster!

The worst part of the whole thing is that you have absolutely no choice in any of this. Right? You’re just a little kid—completely without options or authority. Right? This situation is utterly hopeless because you are entirely powerless. Right?

Not quite.

You see, kids are actually masters at expressing their will! The average 5-year-old may not have any say in whether he or she gets to stay home from grandma’s dinner, but this child does have the power to choose the fashion in which they go.

Will they get in the car willingly and obediently? Will they throw a temper tantrum and refuse to come out of their fort? Will they lock their self in the bathroom in protest? Will they drop to the ground so their parent is forced to drag them—kicking and screaming—into the car? Will they cry through the whole car ride? Will they pout? The options for response are virtually endless. So, while the parents can control where the child goes and when they cannot control the child’s attitude (much to many parents’ chagrin). When all other choices are gone, they still have this much. The child is never completely without power.

This is personal agency. We first begin to learn it as small children. It’s the notion that we can take responsibility for our self and act on our own behalf. We can speak up for our self, behave the way we choose, we can make our own decisions.

In fact, we actually carry this power within us at all times—through our entire life.

It can get a bit clouded as we move out of childhood, though. As we get older, exercising our agency becomes less intuitive. We are taught to follow rules, respect authority, fit in with the crowd, be polite, and generally be as amenable as possible. In agreeing to these implicit societal regulations, we are consenting to forfeit some (or even much) of our power. This starts to feel more natural than standing up for ourselves.

The more natural it feels, the easier it becomes to give our power away. Most of the time we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Instead, we think it’s being taken from us, or we believe we never had any, to begin with. To be fair, when big or bad things happen it truly can make us feel powerless. It knocks the wind right out of us and leaves us slack-jawed. If we can be this blindsided, how powerful are we really? But the truth is that we’re so much more powerful than we know! We can’t predict or prevent everything, and we’re not immune from suffering. But even in our darkest moments, we always have the power of choice, perspective, attitude, action. We always have agency. Even the smallest seed of strength can turn out to be unspeakably powerful.

This can be a hard thing for some of us to hear because it doesn’t seem to fit our own experiences. As I write this I can almost feel some people bristling and thinking that I just don’t get their situation. If you’re one of those people, I imagine you might be thinking something along the lines of the following.

Maybe some people have power, but you’re just not one of those people. For you, there are no options to choose from—no good ones, anyway. The cards of life are simply stacked against you and you are voiceless, powerless. In fact, you find it almost insulting for me to suggest you can so easily just stand up for yourself.

I hear you loud and clear!

I truly understand how real your sense of powerlessness feels. You’re not just making it up. You’re not exaggerating. This is your honest experience. And you’ve probably lived it for the better part of your life.

You live with limits.

Limits hamper our power and restrict our choices by their very nature. And there are always limits to life. Very real limits—oppression, illness, disability, circumstances, finances, social restriction, and so on. Unfortunately, they are not always very evenly distributed amongst us, so it can sometimes feel like you have so many unsurmountable restraints while other people have none at all. The truth is, we all have unique limitations of our own. And the point is that these limits do not actually render any of us completely powerless. We just need to be reminded of our inner strength of choice.

I like to think of our limits as rubber bands stretched out in front of us (as in a finish line). The rubber bands are stretchy. And each one stretches to a different degree, because some limitations are more restrictive than others. But every single one stretches.

But we more commonly view these bands as barriers. Stopping points. Things that absolutely do not stretch or yield to us in any way, but keep us penned in instead. I find that this view is often connected to those implicit societal rules about not challenging the status quo or making too much noise. Stretching our rubber band limits would likely ruffle feathers, so we forget it’s an option. But it is! Because we always have a choice, even if it’s simply our choice of attitude.

The hard part is that all choices come with consequences. And sometimes, when the consequences are too great, we tell ourselves we have no choice. But this itself is actually a choice.

We are always choosing.

We don’t have to go to work, or pay our bills, or abide by the law. We could risk the consequences of not following through with these things. Most of us do these things so automatically that we don’t even notice we are making decisions. We forget to give ourselves credit that every moment of every day we are acting out our agency in big and small ways.

So, when it comes to the really big barriers—unhealthy relationships, chronic illness, debilitating anxiety, and so on—we forget our own power.

Pushing against rubber bands of this size takes a lot, and it can feel easier not to bother.

Takes courage to decide to push against the band and stretch it. Especially when you’ve been taught for so long that you’re not supposed to. And if you’ve forgotten what it was like to be that 5-year-old child who is so adamant about asserting their will, that they do not even care if they get in trouble for doing so.

Deep inside each and every one of us, that child lives on. The child that intuitively knows how to consider consequences and strategically act on their will. The child that courageously stretches and tests every rubber band barrier that gets in their way. The child that fights to protect their pillow fort and everything else they hold dear.

You are still this warrior.

Vanessa Bork is a therapist at Vitality Collective. She is an existentially-informed therapist who believes in the resiliency of our spirits, and works hard to help you discover the strength within you.