Are we choosing our life?

Danfalc

Banned
For me i have to keep thinking we can change things,someone once said to me its not the cards your dealt its how you play them sort of thing.Sounds like your having a shit time at the moment and im sorry to hear that.

Just remember your probaly being hard on yourself,with depression or just low mood it really does cloud your judgements and makes you see things in black and white.Life might be far from perfect for you right now but im sure in those ten years you have done somthing posative or made some improvement or been happy for a little bit,and i think you will be again its just hard to see right now because you feel like your back to square one again.
 

danstelter

Well-known member
Now is the time to make the change necessary in your life. Sure, things are frustrating and basically the same, but now you can start to step forward and make some changes. Identify some things that you would like to change - your job, your residence, your personality, your anxiety, whatever. Life does a little bit of choosing for us, but we have a great amount of power to change our life as well. The trick is figuring out what is making us unhappy in our current life, and then identifying concrete steps we can take that may bring about desired improvements. Remember that the journey will be filled with difficulties and challenges, but it can be done, and things will get better if you work to make them better!
 
It's both, I think. Things happen in our life that we have no control over. Things we don't want in our lives and situations we don't want to be in happen.
But it's our choice how we react to them. What we do once life has put us in a particular situation. It's hard to be strong for such a long time, but you have to try. Try new things to get out of your situation. If one thing doesn't work, try something else. Your attitude ten years ago was that you wouldn't make any changes and nothing would happen in your life. And that came true because you expected it to! That doesn't mean in any way that you're lazy or just didn't bother, I don't think that at all.
But imagine if you had imagined a wonderful life for yourself ten years down the line? Would it have been different? Maybe.
I repeat affirmations to myself a lot, and I really support the use of them. If you tell yourself you're weak, then you ARE weak. If you tell yourself over and over and over that you are recovering and you are changing, you will eventually believe it.
It hasn't been ten years yet, not until this December. Why don't you fight to change a little bit before then? Then it won't have turned out as you expected or told yourself it would. You will have chosen something else.

Sorry about the really long post! :D
 

phoenix1

Well-known member
It's funny cause just a couple days ago I was looking at my old journal entries back in 1999 and 2000. I was utterly amazed the extent of how every entry dripped of poison and self loathing. I think its hardly a coincidence that I've had such a hard time with self-esteem when every single day I filled myself with such horrid thoughts.

If there is one thing I've learned, is that pain is relative. No matter what life throws at us, pain is pretty damn consistant. We feel pain during the 'good times' and the 'bad times', its just at different things. Like for example, during the good times, we might feel excessive pain from the all little things around us...but during bad times we might feel pain on those large bad things, but not even worry about the little things anymore.

Things can get better though regardless of what's going on around us. Right now I'm at my worst economically & physically, but I still feel so much better than I did 10 years ago when I was healthy and secure. I've tried to make my peace with the world. I've had enough pain in my life to last 100 lifetimes, it's time I just sat back and appreciate the good for once.....because the other thing I found out is that there is just as much good and joy as there is pain and fear.
 

bleach

Banned
The static ego is an illusion. But it's an easily reinforced illusion because the brain connects these reference points (the 10 year old journal entry and your state of mind when you read it)... without considering all the other points between them that do not match. And all the points to come which will not match.

I can promise you, and it is clear just from your posts on SPW, that you have not been constantly been the same person as the one you think you are. I can promise you that IN ONE DAY you are not consistently the same person at every moment. The mind changes constantly just from gained experience - which changes our perspective - which changes us if only by an imperceptible degree. Do not cling to the fiction that you cannot change because you WILL change, even without trying - but what you want is to control the change, and that takes prolonged, guided effort on your part...

What -do- you want to be? Where do you want to be? You would not be having these feelings without desires. If you know what you want, then you probably know what is holding you back; how can you fight it? In your heart I think you already know the answer.
 

eso

Well-known member
quite an interesting post you got there. It definitely hits a chord with me on some levels. I am past this part of my life however, but doesn't mean i forgot it.

life will choose you as long as you let it. That's all I can say about that. We all suffer from a phobia that's completely ruining our groove, tho. Thing is, no matter how difficult this obstacle is, that's the life that was handed to us and we have no choice but to deal with it. Is it fair? No. Is it your responsibility as an adult to deal with it anyway? Yes. Same with fat people. Some of them might have a medical condition that makes it way harder for them to lose weight than other "lucky" folks. They still have to deal with it by working harder than others do to lose the weight.

So you do all the things necessary to get around that awful phobia given to us by things beyond our control and get it under control. I certainly was totally screwed by this fear but eventually I got so tired of being one of the losers in life and pushed myself... not to being a winner but at the least I got myself to a "normal" state, relative to everyone else at least. But doing just that took so much energy and courage, I can't begin to tell you how hard and scary that was.

But I did it, and let me tell you, once you take that first step and get your momentum going, the momentum picks up and it gets easier, faster, better. It won't be overnight but as you grow it does get easier. It was things like reading Dr. Phil "Life Strategies" and stuff like that what got me started on this. I really recommend that book above everything else, read that *first*.

This feeling of normalcy I have, it's the best feeling in the world. I know you all around here have that feeling of being lonely and abnormal and the world sucks and you got the short end of the stick. You'd give anything just to live a normal life where you could just have friends to go out with, have a wife/husband, kids, regular job, house, etc. I have problems in my life but I at least got to the point where I'm well on my way to this normal life. Sounds bland, but to us sufferers it's a dream.
 
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