🧵 Thursday Thread: Has a small decision ever changed your life?
Annie Dillard said, "How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives." But often don't see till later how small choices--made once or repeatedly--alter our life. Let's share our stories.
Oh my, I have so many answers to the above question. So many small decisions that became, over time, monumentally important in the course of my life.So many decisions that, at the time, felt almost casual, or automatic but ended up being far weightier than I understood at the time.
However, as I paused to really consider the second part of the question (… that ended up changing your life?) I had to sit with that a moment. Ended up changing my life? Well, I chose to interpret the question in a big way—like, changed, in a genuinely monumental way—the course of my life. And as soon as I put it in that light, I knew that it was the decision, when I was just barely fourteen years old, to tell my mother that my stepfather had sexually abused me throughout her six-year marriage to him, starting when I was four years old.
When I “made the decision” to tell, it wasn’t how it sounds. It wasn’t that I had previously decided not to tell. I had previously not recognized what I had experienced. It was at school, in a health class, where I learned about bad touching, and realized, “Hmm, that’s … what happened to me. That’s what that was.” Once the light was turned on, I figured, rather casually, that I should mention it to someone, since that’s what the person in the film at school said to do. I wasn’t sure, but I tended to follow instructions. So I told.
That seemingly small decision absolutely changed the entire course of my life, including to this day—something I capture only a fragment of in my memoir The Part That Burns. The actual magnitude of the impact of that decision will undoubtedly continue to reverberate until the end of my life.
Those reverberations have often been more painful than anything else. The hopeful redemption narrative of #metoo (i.e., that once we tell, we might be freer, that once we tell, justice might be done) is a false one. Often, once we tell, things get worse. That’s certainly what happened to me. I have written about that here, in an essay called “The Cost,” in case you are new here and don’t know my work.
Nonetheless, that decision to speak up allowed me to become myself, and it allows me still to become myself, a little bit more so, every single day. Becoming real can hurt, as we know from the Velveteen Rabbit. I am realer every day, and for that, I am profoundly grateful.
I would love to hear about a small decision or series of small decisions that changed your life. You need not consider this question from the lens of magnitude, as I did, though. Feel free to lower the stakes! For example, my casual decision to take a teacher training in 2009 led, indirectly, to writing my first book. It’s a much richer story, but you see what I mean. Or, my decision to send an email to a friend led to my work at the University—another beautiful story I could flesh out sometime.
The point is, the way in which the decision changed your life need not be of breathtaking magnitude. Change is change, and our lives are richer and clearer when we pause to recognize both the change and its origin story.
Love,
Jeannine
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