I Chose This Life?

If souls pick their paths, I have some notes.

A friend once told me a psychic said we write our own life stories before we’re born.

Take a minute with that one.

Because I don’t know many people who would wish for exactly what they got.

Maybe it’s just where I am right now, but —

Seriously — fucking seriously?

What could possibly be worth some of the shit we go through?

Is there something to be gained from it? Something we didn’t see at the time, because we were too busy surviving?

If the psychic was right, and I really did choose this life…

did losing my mom in front of me when I was four change me in a way I needed to be changed?

To survive the rest of it?

Or were there a hundred smaller lessons I could’ve picked that would’ve done the job more slowly?

Was there some kind of soul-level bonus multiplier for getting through it?

Like a billion Karma gold stars for not breaking?

What about the rest — losing your job and panicking about survival;

watching people you love get cancer, Alzheimer’s, strokes;

watching them lose spouses, limbs, or themselves.

If there’s a reward system, I’d really like to see the logic.

Because I wouldn’t have signed up for half this crap without some kind of a prize on the other side.

And yet — something deep inside me…

something from my mom, maybe, or just the knowing that she loved me

with her whole heart for four whole years — it changed me.

It made me different.

I know I sound angry a lot. But I really do feel people’s pain.

I got the overflowing dose of empathy.

Sometimes it physically hurts me to hear someone else’s story.

When my coworker Dawn lost her sister, I felt it. Deep in my body.

I thought about what it would be like to lose my own, and I got swallowed whole by the pain.

It happens to me all the time.

I’ve thought about becoming a grief counselor.

But the truth is, I’m afraid.

I’d be good at it.

But loss — even pet loss — wrecks me. I absorb it.

And so when I sit with someone in their pain, when I cry with them,

when I show up for them and then they stab me in the back?

Yes, I get angry — maybe angrier than I should — because I felt it. I meant it.

Not from the sidelines — from the center.

It’s a lot to carry.

So if I chose this life, I’d really love to know why.

And if I didn’t… what do I do with it now?

If you’ve ever wondered why your story unfolded the way it did, you’re not alone.

How do you make sense of it?