Excuse my use of the B word but we bitch about life more than we try to change it. I’ve done this and I’ve seen others do it. Someone will tell me about how much they hate their job. Months go by, same job, same boss, same complaints, same long hours. A year goes by and I see them again. They’re still at the same job and telling me all the same things.
It makes sense to be scared. Stepping into the unknown, even when the known is horrible, is a leap. My cousin stayed with someone for three years after she knew it was over. She didn’t stay because she loved him. She stayed because starting over seemed too difficult. She said that once, too difficult, and I recall being confused by the choice of words, but understanding what she meant.
You still choose though. Inaction is a choice too. It’s a passive choice, but still a choice. Every day you don’t leave, every day you don’t say anything, every day you don’t do something different, you’re choosing to stay. We live as if inaction is somehow a sort of neutral or a middle ground, well it’s not.
The smallest step counts for something. Setting one boundary, saying no one time you would have otherwise said yes. I started waking up a half hour earlier last year and no, it didn’t fix my life or anything like that, but it did give me time I hadn’t had before. The time to think, or maybe just time.
We wait for the perfect time and the perfect feeling. A sign or something that now is the time. What if that never comes? What then? Do we just keep waiting? Wait for five years and now we’re even more bitter because we’ve wasted time on top of everything else.
I’m not sure growth always feels like growth. Sometimes it just feels like discomfort or it just feels like you made your life worse for a moment. My friend quit his job without having another job lined up and everyone called him irresponsible and maybe he was. But he’s doing just fine now and more importantly, he moved.
Sometimes the difficult part isn’t the change. Sometimes the difficult part is admitting you’ve been bitching about something you actually had the power to change, if only slightly.
