Choose To Live Life To Its Fullest, No Matter What Obstacle You Face

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Life is complicated. It is full of things we don’t understand, like decaf coffee, the death of a loved one, and how ornament shops stay in business during the off season (but, really…?)
By 21 years old I have experienced the premature death of my adoptive dad, a snowmobile accident that almost killed me, the purposeful disassociation from my biological father, and a variety of self-esteem issues stemming uniquely from each experience.

At a certain point I began to wonder ‘how does one truly explain the value of life?’ Can we explain it in words? Or sentences? Maybe in numbers or algorithms? I have come to question if life has any value at all. What if I am just an ant in the eyes of God? He can pour salt on my wounds and step on my ant hill house to kill everyone I love, just because. He just does it, as we do to ants, to see what will happen.

That is how I felt when my dad died. Everything went so fast and so unkind that I wasn’t even sure if it was real. I felt stuck in a sea of confusion and I still haven’t really gotten out. The day it happened I sat in my bed and walked deeply into the ocean of my mind and sank until the water was black. I sank and sank until all of the words in my head became wordless and all my thinking became thoughtless.

Everyone felt bad for me that day. Then a month went by, and then a year, and then everyone else forgot and moved forward. Except me. I still have to wake up every morning feeling like it happened an hour ago. I still have to do everything everyone else is doing even though my dad just died an hour ago.

After this experience I realized that life is complex and ugly. Most days I wake up and say “okay, even though I don’t want to get out of this bed, I will.” I trust that there is a foundation beneath me to catch my steps. Sometimes that foundation is friends or family, and sometimes it’s just the hardwood floor.

But it’s there. The secret to getting through it all is to Choose it. You have to fucking want it. Choose to live. Choose to wake up in the morning and be okay with not being okay. You have to Choose to get out of bed and pick up all of the fallen pieces. So stop feeling sorry for yourself and Choose It.  Choose it for as long as it takes and one day life will Choose you.

All of the hardships you’ve suffered will come together into this beautiful tangled web of existence and you’ll thank God, or whatever is out there, that the ant hills you worked so hard to build, were destroyed.

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