You Need To Take Control Of Your Life

The Virgin Suicides

You are a powerful person. No one ever knows what they’re capable of until something happens that forces them to rise to the occasion. And then a natural high starts to wash over their body and they realize that they haven’t been living up to their full potential. They can achieve so much more if they just tap into their inner Sasha Fierce.

It’s easy to go through this life letting bad things happen to us. It’s easy to lay in bed all day, feeling vaguely depressed, picking at the wounds. (You never stop picking scabs. This habit always stays with you.) By giving other people power though, we’re taking it away from ourselves. We’re letting someone come in and twist us violently around their finger. Then we act surprised when, after the closeness fades and the body turns cold, we get upset. We feel empty. We let someone in to fill us up, only to deplete us later. How, how how?

There are so many things in this life that we cannot control. Cancer, assault, someone waking up one day and deciding they don’t love us anymore. We go outside every day knowing that we’re leaving a portion of it up to the fates. “Be kind to me, sweetie!” you say to the sky as you’re leaving your apartment. “Fair warning, I’m not up for any bullshit today.” We complain when our lives become unexpectedly difficult, when curveballs are thrown and we have to act immediately. But what we fail to give attention to are the bad things that are actually in our power to change. What about that? What about avoiding the things we know will hurt us? What about letting ourselves have the nice life we deserve instead of one full of self-inflicted anxiety and pain?

It may seem like a lot of this stuff is not in your control, that you don’t have the power to change it, but you’re often wrong. You do. It would just involve a little bit more work and responsibility, which a lot of people just aren’t ready for. They say they want to change, they say they want to make things better but the reality is that the bad things still feel good to them. They don’t want to stop the bad habits. A lot of their identity is invested in them and they don’t know who they’d be without it.

This is fine, by the way. Shirking responsibility is something everybody does and if you’re not ready to be accountable, you can’t be forced into it. Just know this though: you do have the ability to change the way your life looks. You are strong. You aren’t helpless. The things you’re able to really do with your life would shock you. You just have to access it. You have to bite the bullet and take control of your life. 

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