You know what you need to do, how long will you put this off? How life has your life become? I want the best for you, but you’ve decided over and over again to avoid the problem and keep carrying this burden.

Avoiding hard choices means staying in our comfort zone. It means you’d rather keep limping through life instead of trying to heal. What painful truth do you refuse to confront? Why do you think the pain of hiding is better than the pain of growth?

I wish I could show you how easy life is on the other side of that truth. How making that one hard choice would make things so much better. Every single day you live is drenched in the regret and anxiety and pain of this burden. Yet you keep carrying it. Maybe you don’t want to hurt someone. Maybe you are scared of the unknown. Maybe you are used to the pain and anything different is foreign and scary. Maybe to make a different decision is to admit you were wrong in the past, and that’s too much.

Whatever your reason, it’s not worth it.

The price you are paying is so incredibly high and you pay it every single day. It’s every night you stayed up late stressing that you should have felt comfy and relaxed in bed. It’s every walk you spent rehearsing arguments that you should have enjoyed seeing trees and clouds. It’s all the growth you could have had by now if you just did the right thing.

And it’s not just you paying the price. What is best for you is usually best for other people too. When we decide not to grow we hold other people back too. Maybe we’re protecting their feelings, or keeping them from pain. But our easy choice is trapping them inside of a hard life too. Sometimes our correct choices have to create the hard life that teaches someone else what they are doing doesn’t work. If we try so hard to protect them then they won’t learn what they need to make their own choices. We aren’t responsible for making other people’s lives flawless and safe. We’re responsible for our own lives and being honest with people. What decisions are you making right now, and how honest are you being with people? Do you tell them you’re okay with how things are? How honest is that when you feel as awful as you do?

Choosing to repeat yesterday’s mistake doesn’t mean you were right yesterday. I don’t care if it is scary, any other choice has to be better than this. We need to do something different. You’re never going to feel ready. Feeling ready means nothing. You felt ready to make the same mistake over and over again and where did that take you? The same place you were but with more pain and less time. Let go of the identity that is defined by old mistakes. Become the person who will do hard things if it means making your life better. The last thing you need is one more day where you go to bed with the exact same failures as the day before.

I want you to feel better. I made the easy choice so many times and paid such a high price. I still do sometimes, but my life got so much better when I made the hard choice a few times. Life became easy not because life actually changed, but because I did. I stopped hiding from the truth. I stopped lying about my feelings. I stopped running from pain and did what I needed to do. I want you to make the right choice. I want you to have an easier life. I want you to stop lying to yourself. The rest is up to you. What choice will you make?

Further reading: If this post resonated with you then I highly recommend Meditations by Marcus Aurelias. Stoicism is all about decisions that make life easier. I like to read one or two paragraphs from this book each morning because it helps me better catch these forks in the road later and choose pain of growth over pain of familiar mistakes. Both are uncomfortable, but one of them takes you somewhere better.