Choice City USA

Reinvention is a luxury, one that I am familiar with from my early school days. Between kindergarten and 12th grade, I went to eight different schools. This meant that not only was I having the normal “first day of school” jitters, but “new kid” anxieties too, eight times over. I learned pretty early on that it was a blessing in disguise. The kids at the new school didn’t know my old mistakes, they couldn’t mock me for that embarrassing thing that happened last year. And I had an opportunity to present a totally new version of myself without anyone knowing how different it was from the previous version. You want to be super Southern and wear pearls and cowboy boots? Nobody will know that at the last school you were a demi-goth drama kid. Want to be edgier? Tougher? More artsy? Sure! Go for it! No one will ever call you out on it. You get to choose how you show up.

Choice is the fuel of reinvention. Even before you get to the part where you change your hairstyle, you have to choose whether to blend in or stand out. Are you trying to appease the masses or sate an internal desire? But more basic than that: are you choosing yourself?

When you’re a kid, it’s only natural to try on a bunch of different hats (literally and metaphorically) to figure out what “yourself” really is. But when something clicks, you know. And that’s when the real choices begin. Because every day, there is going to be someone challenging your choice to be yourself - be that a catty little voice in your head, or the out-loud voice that spawned the internal critic.

This month, I find myself in a totally new place, choosing to build a new life for myself from the ground up. Which coffee shop to try? Which untested trail to run? Whether to speak to this person or that one?

But it gets even better than that.

You know how some cities are nicknamed “The Garden City” or “Music City” or “The Classic City” or whatever? My new home is, I shit you not, “Choice City.” If you wrote that into the script of my life, the director would send it back and say it was too heavy-handed and to make it something less obvious. But no. Here I sit. In Choice City. Making some big damn choices every day about who I want to be now and in the future, what I want to do with my business, how I want to get involved in this new community. It feels like the first day of school over and over and over.

There is, of course, an opportunity cost to every choice we make. To choose one thing is at the exclusion, usually, of something else. The rare exceptions being a salad with steak on top or up-beat remixes of slow jams. But not choosing is also a choice. It is deferring, abdicating, releasing your power to let someone else take the wheel of your life. That’d be like letting your mom dress you for the first day of freshman year (which actually happened and, sorry Mama, but it was not our finest hour and I’d sweated through it before first period anyway). 

We have to choose ourselves first. In choosing ourselves, we create our own reality. One where our desires and needs are valued and prioritized. One where our self-perception can match the way we are perceived by others. Every day, with every breath, we have the opportunity to reinvent ourselves, to rebuild our lives from the ground up with each inhale and create new worlds with each exhale. All with the power of choice.