Choose Your Primary Aim in Life

You can’t have everything in life. A prima donna vocalist is not going to have close family ties in most cases, at least until her career has passed its peak. On the other hand, it is likely to remain the case for some further decades that most women professionals who have chosen children will be paid less than their male peers—as though the short interruptions of maternity leave and the occasional need to accompany their children during working hours were the most salient aspect of their work.

It is important in adult life to acknowledge the trade-offs that you have made. Other people’s values, no matter whether they are tied to you by your history, need not be yours if your priorities do not put family first.

In contrast, if you want to mend fences that may have been damaged by the course of your mental health symptoms over the years, it is important that you be sure of whose viewpoint(s) that impulse stems from. If it isn’t genuinely your own—even if the people you are closest to champion it—you will fail at maintaining “the new you.” Only genuine desires can be integrated into your life. Everything less will show up, sooner or later, as the mirage that it was when you began it.

All of these sentiments may seem false to you. Perhaps you have yet to find your life’s goal. Then your immediate purpose is to direct your heart and mind towards finding what it is.
(C) Copyright Deborahmichelle Sanders 2018. All rights reserved.