Reflected Projections

I sit here at my desk and begin to wonder when I let go of myself. When was it that I allowed myself to focus solely on what another person wanted me to fit into? What kind of life would I have led if I could determine the turning point, the moment in time where I let it all go, and go back to make the opposite choice? Would I be married, own a house, have a car, be in love? Would I be alone, party like a rock star, feel trapped inside freedom? I have no knowledge of what would have happened because life is not a Choose Your Own Adventure where I make a selection and move forward with the story, but just in case I get to peek at the other pages to see if it would have turned out any better, or even just different.

The thing about those books was that the ending, the actual ending of the story, pretty much always turned out exactly the same no matter what path we all chose in the middle. Kind of like life I guess. We are born and we die and everything in between is just a series of turning pages. As is typical, I almost get a glimpse of it but in the end push it away because it is fruitless to try. Just like I feel about everyone else, I will never really let myself change.

As babies, children, teenagers, and sometimes even into early adulthood, other people determine the path. We clearly can not feed ourselves or change our own diapers at infancy and as we grow into teenagers and begin to explore our worlds the people who are closest to us want us to be protected so they establish rules and restrictions on what we are allowed to do. We take this at face value sometimes and the longer we allow another person to make those choices for us the more natural it seems that this would continue all the days of our life. That another person would just continue to coddle us, to “raise” us, and of course to make all the decisions seems like it would be the obvious path.

The fantastic thing about letting someone else run everything, make all the choices and determine the journey that we take, is that we are never to blame if something should go terribly wrong. There is always a scape goat to pin the problem on because we were never the one to make the decision in the first place, it was always someone else. It really is simultaneously liberating but stifling to realize it is not possible to ever be wrong because I never make my own choices. A blessing and a curse to be sure.

I can easily sit around and talk about everyone else and all the bad decisions they make because I am in the perfect place to judge; remember, I have never made a wrong choice in my entire life! Of course, I am somewhat conflicted because, again, I have not made any choices at all. I am not sure how much I like that and I am starting to wonder if I am just a sheep following a shepherd blindly to the edge of a great precipice. For the first time in all of my years on this Earth I am slowly starting to question everything I have grown to believe is right, everything I have been told (in a manner of speaking) to think and feel but at the same time I wonder if it would actually be possible to transform.

Since I have slowly been convinced to change but did not fully realize it was happening to me all this time, what could I possibly do to go back to my own train of thought? Did I ever have one to begin with?

I guess the bottom line is that I have grown accustomed to whom and what I am, to how I live my life and to my daily surrender so whether the answer to that question is yes or no is really of no concern because as we all know, I will personally choose to do nothing about it either way.