If you were to walk into a fine restaurant, you would fully expect to get a menu with a multitude of delectable dishes to choose from for your dining pleasure. While you may not have a taste for foie gras from either a gastronomic or ethical viewpoint, you will have a myriad of other choices that should better suit you. Mr. Virgo once owned a restaurant in Snowmass, Colorado. He had an extremely famous celebrity in one night who put up a huge fuss because there was MEAT on the menu! He calmly explained this was a STEAK HOUSE and perhaps she would be more comfortable moving along to a place with more suitable food. This is much like life. We have this HUGE menu. We can order whatever we want. Granted, sometimes what we want isn’t available, but that doesn’t mean we can’t ask. We have choices. Lots and lots of choices.
A friend and I were chatting yesterday. She was about at the end of her rope from dealing with a particularly needy friend who was sucking the life out of her chest. You know this person. Nothing goes right. Everything is a crisis. Every issue is huge, catastrophic, painful, sad, blah, blah, blah. You may BE this person. I’ll be the first to admit I USED to be that person. Oh, my gosh…I used to just wear people out. Heck, I wore them out so much, I wore MYSELF out!
When I went through my second divorce, I was the one who was being left. Dang…if you haven’t experienced that, count your lucky stars because that is an ugly thing to go through. I was a victim. I mean, I really WAS a victim. I went to visit a friend in Florida about a year after the breakup. My friend was entertaining another friend one evening and I was regaling them with my tales of woe. I wanted their sympathy. I wanted them to feel my pain. I wanted them to hate my ex as much as I did at the time. It was terribly uncomfortable to everyone in the room but me. I was clueless because I was on a mission. I had made a career out of being a victim.
My friend put a hand on my arm and said, “Ginny, that’s all in the past now. Maybe we can move on to another topic.”
Before I could even bristle at her suggestion, her friend piped up and said, “No, no! Let her tell her story. She needs to tell it over and over again until it embarrasses her.”
You could have knocked me over with a feather. I was stunned into silence because suddenly the truth came crashing down all around me. I had been building a castle of glass where I could sit in the tower and wail to the masses. Woe! Woe! I had been making a choice, daily, with anyone who would listen to me. I was choosing to be a victim and I was suddenly embarrassed. She was right…I told the story till it embarrassed me.
We may not have a choice in what happens to us. After all, bad things happen…all the time. I didn’t ask to be a widow. I didn’t ask for the changes that keep marching through my life because of it. But I sure as heck have a choice about how these changes are going to affect me, about how I’m going to react to them, and about who I allow in my life because of them. We all have choices. Don’t be afraid to make yours.
❤