DailyBlog: Best Decision I Ever Made

*** The first three books in my six-part dystopian series have officially made their way out into the world! Check them out!
For the sake of blogging, self-exploration, and contemplation, I’ve been slowly making my way through answering questions from this list

Today’s Question: What’s the best decision you’ve ever made?

This one is easy! The best decision I ever made was to cut almost everything and everyone out of the life in early 2015 and start completely fresh. Literally the only people I kept in my life was immediate family, my long-time best friend since age twelve, and another friend that I’ve known for a many years. Everyone else and everything else > BYE. It wasn’t just people that I cut out of my life, it was everything that I had surrounded myself with both physically and emotionally. I literally peaced out of where I was living and what my aspirations at the time were, because I had to sadly admit that the things that I was so passionate about was comprised of people that I would never share core values with. Being alone is less lonely than being surrounded by people who treat you like you’re worthless, or you only have worth to them when they are personally benefitting from you being in their life but they’ll ditch you the moment that you no longer directly serve their interests. I will never share that type of mentality and constantly feeling betrayed and let down because l really takes its toll.

I’ll never forget March 2015 sitting in my room after a fight with my roommate feeling completely defeated, overwhelmed, and hopeless, and thinking to myself, “This is NOT the life I want. These are NOT the types of people that should be in my life. I DO NOT BELONG HERE.” I was so defeated that I felt like I had two choices; either commit suicide, or just COMPLETELY clean the slate and stop trying to force my own happiness which was only leading to the polar opposite result. Religious people refer to this type of moment/decision as “Giving yourself over to God” but I don’t personally share specific beliefs of religious people. However I do believe in karma; what goes around comes around, sort of the natural balance of things, and I thought maybe if I stopped trying to force my own happiness, maybe life would ease up on me.

It was scary to pack up whatever belongings you could fit in a van and your precious dog and just – LEAVE. Leave EVERYTHING and EVERYONE behind. But I did it because the alternative was even scarier. I don’t think I’ll ever not cringe at the feeling of trauma when I think about how cruel people were to me and how worthless I allowed them to cause me to feel. I made mistakes, but NO ONE deserves how I was treated. I protested, loudly, for a long time, but yet I still allowed such cruelty in my life. The louder I protested / defended myself, the crueller people were. It was a hard lesson for me to learn that sometimes, standing up for yourself means turning your back completely instead of continuing to defend. I’m sure that I would have been better served to have turned my back on all of that negativity far earlier than I did, but at the time I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of “winning”. Eventually though, it just got far too out of hand because the harder I stuck to my guns, the harder they pushed back and it was just a war that no one was ever going to “win” by continuing to fight.

When I finally turned away from all of that and wiped my life-slate clean, I worried about the message it would send to people that they basically won, they got what they wanted; me to completely disappear, but in the end I had no where to go but up, and eventually karma caught up to all of those people in its own way. In the end, my life drastically improved the moment that I turned my back, and well they eventually got smacked with their own karma as well.

I chose to walk away over suicide, but more importantly, a part of that final choice was also vowing to myself that I would NOT repeat my mistakes, and I would NEVER make THEIR mistakes, either. I would NEVER treat anyone the way they treated me. I would NEVER intentionally dismiss a person’s feelings and autonomy, no matter how I perceived their behavior. I would approach people with empathy instead of dismissiveness. This wasn’t even something that I had to TRY to do, it’s literally just a part of who I am, and I’m thankful for that. I’m in a much better headspace than I used to be. I can see the bigger picture. I can understand that people are complex and that no one deserves to be dismissed, especially when the obvious driving force behind their decisions is pain. Now I can think before I react so that I don’t end up in tumultuous situations. I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t finally said to myself, “ENOUGH IS ENOUGH.”

I’m glad that I not only chose to walk away from the negativity that was surrounding me, but I’m glad I took one last chance in trust, and I chose to trust karma to do its thing. I’m glad that I learned that the best focus for my stubbornness was to focus on being the person that I want to be instead of on constantly feeling like I have to defend myself to others. People will behave how they want to behave and no amount of self-defense or protesting will change them, they’ll just gaslight you for it. Let them be. Their karma will come around and its their problem, not yours. My choice to start fresh in life has opened up so much for me. I’m still ME. I’m still very sensitive. I still struggle with the harshness of the world. I still have bad days (clinical depression is a struggle, y’all) but I get through them without self-sabotage and I’m proud of where I am, and who I am. Hands down the best choice I ever made.