Was there an alternative?

Since writing my last post I have been contacted by several people offering support and telling me they admire me for being strong and making my life-changing decision.  Then there were a handful of others who also made me question whether I am strong or if I had just taken the easy way out.  The choice I made was right for me, but it may not be the right choice for everyone.

The decision to stay in or leave an unhappy situation is very difficult, I know because I stayed for over 6 months and until you are in that situation, you do not know how hard each day is.  Every day you have to try to make everyone around you believe that everything is ok, that you are happy.

Those who remain in this kind of situation and continue to be unhappy do so for many reasons.  Most commonly to remain as a single family unit, usually to ensure the happiness of their children.  They are prepared to sacrifice their happiness for the knowledge that they are sheltering their children from the turmoil that surrounds most separations.

Simply, there were two choices, the first was to stand up and be selfish by doing what was best for me; the other was to stay and do what was best for the people around me.  While I chose to get out of the situation and people feel that what I did was brave, I also feel that the option to stay and fight - to put others’ happiness first is, in my opinion, the option that shows most bravery and courage. It shows that the person making the decision feels that the alternative would weigh too heavily on their conscience.

“Conscience is the root of all true courage; if a man would be brave let him obey his conscience.” James Freeman Clarke

Why do we lie to ourselves?

Have a think about the last time you lied to yourself………….

Now ask yourself “Why?”

I recently asked myself this question and was quite shocked by my own response.  I had been lying to myself to ensure someone else’s happiness.  Then after a while I asked myself why was it that I value myself that little that I put someone else’s happiness before my own?

You see, in life sometimes we are all in a situation where we feel uncomfortable and rather than stand up and say what we truly think or feel we find ourselves just going with the flow for fear of what others think of our honesty or for fear of hurting someone we care about.  To make things worse, if you are lying to yourself it can only make you unhappy.

If you are not truly honest, the smallest of lies can get bigger and the snowball effect kicks in, so that over time it engulfs everything and hurts everyone in its path.  The only way to stop this snowball is to stop lying to yourself.

It has taken me nearly 29 years to learn this and I did so whilst at a networking breakfast, I listened to a 4sight from Jim MacLeod, who is, I think, the most positive person I have met and I took one sentence from his 4sight that I had heard before but until that moment had never resonated with me.  “Change the things you cannot accept and accept the things that you cannot change” and hearing it that morning was like an alarm bell going off in my head.

Within a week I had made the biggest decision of my life thus far and decided to stop lying to myself.  It was hard to tell the truth, especially having lied to myself for so long.  Since then I have begun to challenge everything that I cannot accept.  I have to say that whilst the initial pain of making those decisions was hard to deal with and accept, I am a much happier person as a result of making those changes.

 “And, after all, what is a lie?  ’Tis but the truth in masquerade.” Lord Byron