Do it anyway.

I know it’s scary, and hard, and painful, and too intense.

Do it anyway.

Do it because you know it’s what you should do.

Don’t pretend you don’t know what I am talking about. You know what you should do. You know what you want to do, what you need to do. You pretend not to know, and let your mind spin elaborate webs of complication, uncertainty, and distraction in order to keep on pretending. But deep down, you know. And you know that you know. You know that you have been lying to yourself, telling people that you don’t know, acting like you don’t know, when you know exactly what you should do.

You know, and you have always known. You’ve been lying to yourself for a long time, running yourself around in circles, pretending that you can’t see the way out of the forest of your own creating.

But deep down, you know the truth. The very path you pretend to be searching for has been under your feet the whole time. All the complications, all the doubts, all the lies, all that foliage is just to keep you from having to see the hard cold truth : that you know exactly what to do, and choose not to do it.

Yes, choose. You like to pretend like you have no choice, but you choose the life you lead all the time, every day. The forest of doubt and confusion is testament to that. By spinning such a thick and writhing web of obfuscation around the simple facts to hide them, you offer perfect testimony of your choosing to burying your head rather than face the truth.

You know that moment when you think about doing the things you know you should be doing if you want to advance and continue and then immediately bury the thought because it frightens you and makes you anxious to even glance in the truth’s direction?

That’s the moment you choose. You choose to avoid the thought rather than face the truth.

Or how about those truly noble moments when you start to do something good, something right, something that takes you in the right direction at last, and for a while you are even doing it, making progress, finally getting your shit together…. and then you get so scared and so freaked out by the prospect of leaving your pathetic little nest that you choose to stop and bury all the evidence that you even tried?

Yup. That’s the moment when you choose.

It all boils down to this : every moment is a choice, a pivot point, an opportunity. Stopping out of fear and panic is a choice. Quitting because it’s gotten too hard or too confusing or too close to making you have to actually do something instead of just thinking about it is a choice. Giving up because you have run out of momentum is a choice.

And no amount of fear or doubt or emotional pain can change that fact.

Giving up is always a choice.

“But it’s not that simple. ” I hear you say.

Actually, yes it is. It is exactly that simple. You reaches a point of crisis, of extreme emotion, the moments that test people’s souls, and you chose failure and retreat. You chose to run and hide, when you could have chosen to stay and fight. You decided it was easier to just stop thinking about it and do something else, and then pretended that you had no choice but to do the easier thing every single time.

But you do have a choice. It really is that simple. And you choose to fail, retreat, and lie to yourself.

And so you choose the life you lead right now, and claim to hate. You choose it, and prefer it, because you have decided that you know all the paths out and none of them are worth enduring pain and fear past the point of comfort.

That is the choice you are making every time you give up on your own dreams. You can lie to yourself and blame your parents, your life, your job, the economy, your astrological sign, the bus system where you work, or the color of your sneakers, but the real truth is, it all comes down to you.

Face the tasks you know you need to do in order to get out of the trap you have laid for yourself.

Feel the fear, the panic, the uncertainty, the mad, animalistic desire to run and hide till the world goes away.

Face it all, and do it anyway.