I posted this image but Quotes by Christie on my stories last week because when I finally grasped this concept (through a fuck tonne of therapy), it changed my life. So, what’s the concept? Well, I’m glad you asked.

For the longest time I would spend time and energy wondering why things weren’t different, or why someone was being that way and, inevitably, I’d make the leap and conclude that it was because I was doing something wrong or that there was something wrong with me. It was a nasty vicious cycle of self-pity and emotional self-harm that would consume me.

But then my therapist said this to me: “Is it possible that you spend time wishing and waiting for people or situations to be what you want them to be, rather than accepting them as they are?” and just like that, a bomb went off in my brain.

I looked at my past and present relationships that I’d been struggling with. There were two relationships specifically that I’d been beating myself up about between myself and a friend and myself and a family member. For some reason, I couldn’t make things right between us. I wished they would understand, see things from my point of view. I was so frustrated that they weren’t working as hard on the relationships as I was and I was finding that incredibly hard to deal with.

But when I heard my therapist ask me that question, I realised with absolute certainty that she had hit my emotional nail on the head. I was waiting for these people to get with my programme and they weren’t going to. They may even have their own programme that they wanted me to get with and I had no idea. It suddenly became clear to me that I had wasted so much time trying to make these people and these relationships into something else, that I hadn’t actually taken the time to accept the relationships as they actually were.

Did that mean that I had to be ok with letting them potentially go from my life? Yes. That felt very uncomfortable at first. Surely, you weren’t supposed to walk away from people that you supposedly cared about? But were you supposed to care about them if the reality was they didn’t really care about you? I’d been coming at this from the wrong angle all along.

It wasn’t, I realised, my responsibility to make these situations right. Sure, I had a role to play, but I had to accept the reality that maybe these weren’t relationships worth beating myself up over. They certainly weren’t worth me expending the amount of emotional labour over. It didn’t have to be nasty or dramatic: I just needed to make a choice for me rather than wait for them to make the choice I wanted them to.

The same applied to situations. I stopped wishing things were a different way and started accepting the way things were and using that as a starting block rather than an obstacle. I stopped being scared to make decisions based on what I wanted and felt for fear of upsetting someone else. I wasn’t just beginning to embrace situations and other people as they actually were; I realised I needed to embrace myself as I actually was.

It’s amazing how much agency we put on external factors in our life. We are so quick to hand responsibility for our happiness over to other people and places and situations and then wonder why it didn’t work. The reality is that we can change nothing and no one except ourselves. We can only make our own decisions and no one else’s.

We can choose to be pissed or angry at a situation or we can accept that situation and make it work for us in the best way possible. We can choose to write someone off as awful, unkind or unreasonable, or we can shift the focus to our own self and make decisions based on what’s right for us.

It’s about where you choose to focus the energy in life and if you pour it all into a fantasy, you’ll end up with nothing real.