—The things we didn’t choose—
We’ve all been dropped into a reality which we didn’t choose (at least not this version of you).
You didn’t pre-select your natural giftings. You didn’t sign off on your natural predisposition. At no point did you sit down with pen and paper and sketch out what you wanted to look like when you emerged into the world. You didn’t receive an audio recording of options for how your voice would sound through the ages.
Your family, country of birth, your label (aka name), and era – amongst many other things, were all chosen for you. You are part egg, part sperm, with a genetic code you did not have a say in. Your fingerprints hold a design that isn’t replicated anywhere else, but you didn’t get to share your opinion in the design of it. As unique as a snowflake are you in the makeup of your inner workings, yet you didn’t get a chart of snowflakes to look at to determine which snowflake would be the snowflake of you.
You didn’t choose what kind of adolescence you would have. Which traumas you’d experience as a child. You didn’t receive a pamphlet of options for how you’d experience your first time being bullied, your first heartache, your first crush, or the day you would begin puberty.
You didn’t choose whether or not you’d be held as a child, comforted in your pain, guided through the early stages of life, whether you’d have nightmares, or impulsive thoughts, or fears.
There are countless things we didn’t choose.
There are many things we don’t get to choose.
There are some things we can force a choice towards (without seeing what the choice would be for us – like death) – but it would be nothing more than an attempt at control.
We think “inside our minds” and hear the thoughts like a voice, yet we didn’t choose the voice. And no one else can hear it, or them (the voices), the way we do.
We carry memory, moments, heartbreaks, trauma, joy, fears, hopes inside a mind that holds something science cannot define – consciousness. Your consciousness is a boiling soup of all the things you didn’t choose. And you didn’t have a say in waking up each day with it, living each day with it, and falling asleep with it.
You are the only one that wakes and sleeps to the whole of you —a boiling soup of things you never chose.
So where does choice actually begin?
It begins in translation.
—And we are all translators—
Like a radio receiver, our brains are constantly getting an influx of signals. Most of those are filtered out. We zoom into the parts that matter for us. And for many of us, those signals remain largely sub-conscious. But in the dance of signal and response, meaning is created. Definitions are drawn. Distinctions are made. Formulas are created or adhered to. Patterns are spotted, discarded, integrated, or never noticed at all.
Some of us accept the signal and receive it willingly with the world’s interpretation. And some of us begin wanting agency within the influx of signals when it comes to the meaning assigned.
Within our soup of all the things we don’t control, what you do get to choose is how you dance with signal.
In a reality where so much of what you are is unchosen, you get to choose how you translate your reality. And that translation directly impacts the quality and shape of your life.
So, maybe you don’t choose how it all begins or how it all ends but you get to choose the in between; the in-between is where translation happens. The translations shape the life you experience.
And we are all translators.
Happy Translating, Friends.
Love, Steph
Shadow Whimsy
Thank you for writing this. Here's to translation.
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