No One Asked You

TaylorRuth
3 min readJan 14

So why did you choose to do it?

Photo by Kristina Flour on Unsplash

Every day we make roughly 35,000 choices. I would say often, if not always, we’re not aware that they’re choices. We think what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is just the way it is.

But it we sit back and think about it, that’s impossible. It’s impossible because the 7.8 billion people on the planet are not all doing the same thing the same way. If they were Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok would not be nearly as popular.

We get to choose what we do, how we do it, and when we do it. And we also get to choose to change whenever we want for any reason we want. Recognizing that level of freedom is either terrifying, liberating, or both.

We get to apply this choice towards our relationships. Do I choose to let my parent treat me poorly? Do I choose to make sacrifices for my partner? Do I choose to enable my child’s behavior?

All choices have consequences — and often the prospect of having a consequence that is unknown to us is enough of a deterrent to not allow ourselves to make the choices that best serve us.

We’d far prefer to be a martyr than happy. But why? Is happiness that bad? Did we do something in a previous life that made us not deserving of peace? Is our own inability to feel joy for someone else’s good fortune a reflection of our own inability to allow ourselves to feel joy?

I’ll let you decide on that one. I’m not here to speak for you. I am here to share some insight on my own reflections.

Over the last year I’ve made choices without being asked. I woke up at 5:30 in the morning every morning for 6 months so that I could talk to my boyfriend that was in a timezone 9 hours different than mine.

Then, I moved countries because life is short and I needed to try my best in this relationship — even though I have zero desire to live in the United States and am repulsed by most of what is happening in the country. I then woke up at 5AM every morning for work because I wanted a healthy amount of overlap with my colleagues across that were now in a different timezone.

You made those choices for you. He benefitted from them, but you made them. No one asked you.

TaylorRuth

Living between Seattle & Paris. Student of people, self, French, and yoga in between.