Choosing Yourself Is a Direction, Not an Event
Definition
The choosing is not a single dramatic moment. It is the accumulation, across ordinary days and ordinary moments, of a thousand small decisions made from the inside out rather than from the outside in. It looks like the quiet Tuesday morning in which you did not apologize for taking up space. The conversation in which you said the truer thing. The work you finally showed to another person. The need you finally named out loud. The limit you finally held, not dramatically, not with a speech, just by not moving past it. The choosing produces more of your actual life. That is what it produces. More of you, present, in the life that is yours to live.
Origins & Context
Brene Brown's research on courage and vulnerability establishes that the willingness to show up as you actually are, repeatedly and in ordinary circumstances, is the foundation of wholehearted living. Her studies of people she describes as living with courage show that the defining quality is not grand heroic acts but the daily, unglamorous practice of choosing authenticity over comfort. Viktor Frankl, writing from the particular clarity that surviving Auschwitz produces, argued that the last human freedom is the freedom to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances. Choice, for Frankl, was not occasional. It was the continuous act of determining who you were in the space between stimulus and response. Self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, adds a structural dimension to this: humans have three basic psychological needs, autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and the need for autonomy, the experience of acting from one's own values and internal compass rather than external pressure, is not optional equipment. It is what a self requires in order to function. When autonomy is consistently suppressed, whether by environment or by habit, the cost is not merely dissatisfaction. It is the progressive loss of contact with your own preferences, your own direction, your own life.
The choosing is not the moment you finally decide. It is the thousand ordinary moments in which you decide again.— Nikita Datar
How It Shows Up
Choosing yourself as a direction shows up as the accumulation of small corrections rather than a single transformation. You notice you have said yes when you meant no, and the next time, you say no. You notice you have swallowed the true thing again, and the next conversation, you let it out. You notice the pattern of deferring to someone else's preferences as the default, and you begin, awkwardly at first, to consult your own. It shows up in the moments just before the old pattern runs: that small pause, that flicker of recognition. The pause is the practice. You will not always choose differently. But the direction is established when you begin to notice that a choice is happening and that you are the one making it. It looks like honoring your own tiredness. Like pursuing the work you are actually drawn to rather than the work that makes the best explanation. Like saying what you think before you have smoothed it into what the room expects. Like stopping the apology that was forming and asking yourself whether you actually did anything that required one.
Nikita's Note
For a long time I thought that choosing myself meant some kind of definitive break, a moment where I would finally stand up and declare myself and everything would reorganize around that declaration. What it actually looked like was much smaller and much less cinematic. It looked like texting back the true thing instead of the easy thing. Like staying in a difficult conversation instead of performing resolution. Like letting someone be disappointed in me without immediately trying to fix it. The drama of a single event is actually easier than the direction, because a direction asks you to keep showing up for it, in ordinary circumstances, when no one is watching and nothing important seems to be at stake. That is where the real work is. In the unremarkable Tuesday when the choosing happens quietly and counts anyway.
From the work
The choosing is not the moment you finally decide. It is the thousand ordinary moments in which you decide again.From When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself by Nikita DatarAbout this book
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See all in The Inner Lexicon →I wrote about this in When You're Ready, This Is How You Choose Yourself — available on Amazon.