A lot of my favorite stories and bits of wisdom shared therein tend to revolve around the idea that we, ultimately, are the ones who choose our mood and outlook. From the “I choose joy” speech by Merle Highchurch in The Adventure Zone’s first season to “life does not have to be a perpetual conflict” from the excellent webcomic Little Tiny Things, and all throughout the lexicon of stories from varies points of my life, the idea that we are the one who gets to set the tone and timbre of our response and attitude towards the world is one that appeals deeply to me. It’s one I believe in, with a degree of faith that I’ve rarely managed to muster for anything else except my days of devout Catholicism (when I didn’t know there was anything else out there). A comparison I make because I’m not sure it’s true and it’s definitely not a pearl of wisdom I am living by. As you’ve probably seen by the weekly posts on my blog, I tend to react strongly to the world around me. My emotional state is often dictated by the situations I’m in and the events that occur around me. I have little emotional… inertia, let’s say. I will cry at the drop of a hat if you tell me the hat dropped because it couldn’t stay on a head no matter how much it wanted to. I will get incandescently angry if I see someone mistreated. Whatever mood a room takes will bleed into me no matter how else I’m feeling. I rarely feel like I am in control of my emotions these days, despite how skilled I was at emotional control earlier in my life.

Calling it “emotional control” is probably a bit misleading, though. It was all suppression. Tamping down whatever I felt so it wouldn’t broadcast anything to my brother and would allow my parents to see me as they stoic, responsible child my parents demanded I be. It took years of therapy to dig myself out of that and then years of therapy to be able to handle and process my emotions in a healthy manner. So now they burn brightly and fiercely at the slightest provocation and then immediately begin to dwindle unless something is happening to keep them blazing. Eventually, I’m sure, they’ll be more easily moderated. Still, even when I was suppressing my emotions, I didn’t really get to pick what I did or didn’t suppress. It was all-or-nothing. And the idea that you could just pick? That you could intellectually decide how you feel about things? That always appealed to me. I’m a bit of a self-described sad-sack these days, since it is much easier to be miserable and upset than to solve any of the problems that are making me feel that way (especially since most of them aren’t in my control in a way that leads me towards any kind of swift resolution), so I often find myself wishing I could respond to the things in my life, and the situations of the world around me, in a way that resonates with choosing joy or not being in conflict with myself or the world around me, but it’s difficult to do either one of those. How am I supposed to choose joy when every other thing I learn about the world outside my direct line of sight is telling me how bad things are or how any peace and joy I feel is often at the cost of letting a corrupt, evil administration act without at least objecting? How am I supposed to pick something other than conflict when everyone around me is being pushed (or is doing the pushing) to use an exploitative technology built on the theft of all of human creativity and the invisible, outsourced, and underpayed labor of underprivileged countries when something like that ought to be opposed at every turn?

I wished I lived in the kind of world where I could choose to be happy or at peace. I wish I lived in a world where I had the capacity to simply exist and explore my own feelings. But I do not. Our world demands decisions and I choose joy or peace as much as I can, but those options seem to be less and less viable with every passing day. Choosing peace when my country is starting wars, kidnapping heads of state, enabling genocides, and so much more vile shit than I can keep track of feels like a betrayal of my own values. Choosing joy when there is necessary work to be done feels the same, or maybe even worse because it’s the one I most often choose instead of what I should probably be doing (like more job applications, more calls to politicians, more active protesting, or even just going to bed). I wish I lived in a world where the choices I made were better ones, not because I’m struggling to make good choices but because all I have most days is bad options. Which is a hell of a thing, you know? I can feel happy about something, but not without knowingly blocking out the part of me that is aware of what is going on in the world. I can feel joyful, but only my ignoring everything else. I can feel at peace or in community with those around me, but only by compromising on my values since everyone physically around me, at the very least, has crossed lines that I view as personally uncrossable. I can avoid fights and conflict, but only by choosing to silence myself when someone speaks of something I cannot abide.

I wish I could make myself choose to be happier about things. To get back up and carry on more readily when something happens. But I’m burned out and teetering on the long, drawn-out edge of some kind of breakdown because life has given me little without needing a great deal of effort (I’m aware enough of my own privilege to feel bad for saying that since I had it easier than many others would have if they’d lived my life) and has dashed my hopes for myself and my existence at just about every turn because all of the privileges that might have seen me through the trials of my life are things I’ve either willingly forsaken in order to maintain my independence from my parents or been denied by parents who thought it would build character or independence to force me to go without advantages they themselves enjoyed (I think I will forever hold it against my parents that they gave me such bad financial advice when I was picking a college, which resulted in me graduating with six figures of debt, since there absolutely WAS a difference between a local-ish state college and the private institution I picked, as I suspect that their agenda was oriented more toward steering me toward a religious institution that aligned with their values than steering me towards future financial stability). I am incredibly aware of the reprieve my siblings have enjoyed from rent or the costs of collegiate education by living with our parents, and how I knew from the day I graduated college that I would rather die than return to living under their roof. Which just goes to show that I’ve been making decisions all along, I guess. Ones that aligned with my deeply-held beliefs about the way I should navigate life. I just wished they’d turned out better.