I had a thought today.  We all get choices. How we live this one precious life is completely up to us. How we take care of our bodies, how we take care of our mental health, how we choose to move in this world it’s completely up to us. If you don’t want to take care of yourself, no one else is going to do it for you, no one will come along and force you to be an adult. No one will check to make sure you are doing the things you should do to survive and be healthy. If you’re lucky you may have people in your life that care about you, and they may try to encourage you to do the right things for yourself. They may want good things for you but at the end of the day, you are the only one who can choose to actually do things that make a difference in your own life.

You, the fully functioning adult gets to make tiny decisions every second of the day to be a little better or to destroy yourself a little further.  What seems like inconsequential decisions can lead to major life alternating habits.  The older I get the more I see it happen and clearly understand the reasoning. From simple routines like unhealthy foods, not taking care of your health or being financially irresponsible, hoping one day it will all just work itself out.  If you indulge in the wrong habits, that seem harmless, like online gambling, pornography, drinking alcohol daily or doing drugs, it builds up over time until you no longer possess the control to stop it. I also want to add the relentless addiction to social media to this list, which is proving to be just as harmful.

I remember reading a novel once about a lady who had become an alcoholic and she carried on with her life consciously thinking that someone would eventually stop her.  I’m sure a lot of people think this way but who exactly do you believe is supposed to stop you from damaging yourself? I’ve seen too many times when family and friends try to intervene and just to be ignored or told to mind their own business, so when life has fallen into negative addictions or behaviors, when one stops caring enough for themselves, who exactly do you believe should step in to show you the way? I can tell you the answer, no one.  No one will be able to stop you if you don’t care enough about yourself to want to stop.  No one can force you to do anything that you are not willing to do for yourself.  When children become a certain age it’s harder to force them to behave in a particular manner because they become fully autonomous beings. So why is it so hard to believe that you as an adult will ever be convinced against your own will?  

Don’t live your life as though there is a future rescue party coming to save you from yourself.  There is not. You get to make decisions and live with the consequences of those decisions, both good and bad. Life can be complicated yet beautiful and full of choices. Choose wisely, don’t purposely make your life harder with the hope for rescue later, no one is coming.