Here’s Why Everything Happens for YOUR Reason. — Part 1

The Powers of Change and Choice

In middle school, I was given the option of adding a quote to memorialize my experience in seventh and eighth grade.

How does a thirteen-year old boy give an acceptable quote for years that he absolutely despised?

Well, I’ll tell ya.

I came up with what I thought was the best line to make all the bullying and self-esteem issues worth it.

Everything happens for a reason.

Fast forward 13 years, and I actually resent that statement.

I now realize that it’s because “Everything happens for a reason” is not just a cliched line but an unfinished concept.

So here’s why everything happens for YOUR reason.

You don’t always choose what happens to you. But you always choose what to do from there.

There’s no time machine (…yet).

We can’t just reverse the things that happened to us.

But that shouldn’t be the point. Because that’s not where the power is.

The power lies in how we interpret the things that happen to us and turn that into fuel for different thought patterns.

Take this example from my life.

You leave a toxic work environment (where you’re the only person in the store with a college degree AND no criminal background) and find a wonderful job only to have your entire department laid off five months after you started there.

You can’t go back and change the client’s mind to keep your department. You can’t go back and find a different, more steady job.

So what do you do?

First, you should feel whatever it is you’re feeling. Something I didn’t do at first because I drowned it in mezcal and tequila for a week straight.

Then, assess what you have and how to use it.

It’s really easy to be negative about it. You could be like me and tell yourself that you’re incapable of keeping a job and that you moved to a town where there’s no good opportunity for yourself.

But what does that do to you?

It programs you to make choices that fulfill that statement.

So you keep finding crappy jobs and instability. Or worse, you could find a decent or even a really good job but you start finding and amplifying problems for why it’s a bad fit.

Remember: negativity is addictive.

Because that’s how our brains needed to be wired to spot danger and survive.

Our brains are designed to translate past experiences into reasons why something is bad and / or should be avoided.

But that ability to make something negative can be transmuted to make something positive.

So anything bad that happens to us can be redesigned to fit the narrative that we want our life to be.

Going back to the job example, working with genuinely bad people (from irresponsible and careless employers to fully convicted felons) taught me not just the importance of raising my standards, but how and why to raise my standards.

Getting laid off taught me how to be resilient and careful with my finances and job applications.

Ultimately, I never wanted those things to happen to me. And for a while, it calloused me into a jaded version of myself.

But now I get to say:

“I am so much more resilient, disciplined, and have a level of integrity I never would’ve had without those experiences.”

That’s because I chose to reinterpret those bad experiences to fit the narrative I want my life to abide by.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this, subscribe for more streams of consciousness and check out some of my other works!