The Girl Gets To Choose

When I was a young girl, I fell in love with stories. Our family was made up of readers and our favorite weekly outing was to the library where we would spend hours, browsing the stacks. I remember the first time I discovered a series. The series was about a farmer’s field and a rabbit and then all of the other animals that lived in the surrounding meadow and waterways.

Self-help books were a window into learning at my own speed and I was delighted to be able to choose my own subjects, rather than being subjected to a strict curriculum. I’ve asked my sister about this and she agrees; when we needed to figure something out; whenever something happened and we didn’t know what to do; we would find a book. I still love to walk the aisles of a bookstore or a library and most of all, I love to hold and read a paper book.

These days, so much information is on the internet and Google is the easy way to find answers, although some of the answers online aren’t necessarily truths.

The Girl Gets To Choose - A Preface

This book came about because I joined an online writing group where we shared the pain and stories of our lives. We were strangers that became friends through writing and formed a bond that has furthered my experience of humankind and my spiritual learning.

That sharing revealed to me many truths that had been previously hidden, including the truth that others also questioned the ideals and standards being held up as the ‘right way’ to live our lives: the truth that others hadn’t learned or weren’t taught that they were important as a person. It wasn’t until much later in life that I discovered that I was enough, just the way I am.

This book is a story about a young woman who doesn’t understand that she has value as a person.

It is about someone who thinks she has it all figured out but she is really living a façade. She is living according to someone else’s rules so that she can fit in. It’s not until she decides to take charge of her life that she finds her way. Making choices for ourselves feels risky and right at the same time and this young woman shows how fear can keep us in a wrong choice for too long.

This is a story about love in all its messy forms; how young love is intense and impulsive, trusting and naïve, and how mature love fulfills a deep need within us. It is about love overcoming obstacles and how friendships are bound together by love.

Most of all, it is about the importance of self-love.

It is a story of forgiveness, where love allows one to recover from huge mistakes and how forgiving ourselves for our own mistakes is so important.

It is a story about judgment and how our preconceived notions of who a person is can cloud the reality of who they are and how setting aside judgment can open the door to lasting relationships.

We live in a world filled with images of beautiful people who are living perfect lives and I believe that many of us are trying to meet an impossible standard because of it. Instead of listening to what makes us happy, we strive to acquire more, achieve more, and live more perfectly, according to society’s ideal life.

This is a story about listening to your heart.

Given my history with self-help books and libraries, it was interesting but inevitable, that another book is partly responsible for this book. My discovery of Shawn Coyne’s The Story Grid brought sanity to my writing process and allowed me to organize my thoughts in a way that made sense for the first time. It was as if my book was put under a Sorting Hat, and because of it, for the first time, I could see clearly where it belonged.

This is a work of fiction. This is not a memoir or an autobiography. There are certain events that are autobiographical, as in most fiction books, but the people and the stories of their lives are made up entirely by me. Any similarity or imagined similarity to individual lives is the fault of the author, no one else.

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This story first appeared on Medium by the same author.