My belief in free will versus determinism seems to fluctuate all the time, and the fluctuation isn’t really based on anything. Maybe my moods or how I’m feeling. I don’t lose sleep over it or anything, but I find even now there’s a phrase that really grinds my gears. Not one that you’d think would matter to someone like me. But when I hear it or read it it’s like nails on a chalkboard.
“I didn’t have a choice.”
Bitch. Lol. Even typing it makes me irrationally angry.
I think most of the time, when someone says that, they mean “I felt like I didn’t have a choice.” I know that’s true for me, and usually these statements come about when someone is under duress or not able to make a ‘better’ decision. It shouldn’t change the meaning so much, but it does.
It transforms everything, actually. When someone says they don’t have a choice, I want to shake them until their teeth rattle and show them all of the choices available to them--good, bad, and in between. And yet if that same situation is turned into “I feel like I don’t have choices”...boy I get it, it resonates.
And that got me thinking if there was ever a time in my life where “I felt like I didn’t have a choice” didn’t cut it. Was there a time in my life that I truly didn’t have a choice? To be honest, the majority of childhood feels that way to me. It wasn’t that I made the best choice available, it was more that I was forced into one way of being, and the other alternatives were death.
Or felt like death. Made me think death awaited. Sometimes death was threatened. I watched other youth die…although it usually took long enough that nobody connected their initial bad choice with the dying.
I think part of being a kid is that you by nature don’t feel like your choices matter. If it’s against the rules you’re going to be told no anyway. Something like school sure as hell wasn’t a choice, but it slowly forms into a choice over time. By the time I was in ninth grade and absolutely hated my typing teacher to the boundaries of the earth and back, I was choosing to drag my feet and not entirely skip class, but just not be there enough that I could end the suffering of being in her presence. (She wasn’t that terrible in hindsight, but my teenage ADHD brain could not handle the subject or the classmates.)
I’ve always said that when I ran away from home, I didn’t have a choice. I use those words very purposefully. I made the choice over and over, honestly, and never had the guts to just do it. I thought about it for years, agonized about it. Daydreamed. I remember watching Forrest Gump and when Jenny prayed to be a bird to fly far away, that was kind of what I expected and thought would help.
The tangible aspect of running away didn’t quite reach my mind yet--this was when I was about eleven or twelve. Running away was an idea, it was more abstract. I wanted to be like Oliver Twist, just yukking it up on the streets with the Artful Dodger. Or more accurately, I wanted to be Pippi Longstockings, who just kind of farted around without an adult and made it work and was way cooler than her normie counterpart homies. I didn’t want to die, which is surprising (those feelings came later, lol) I just wanted to not be there.
The abuse and violence escalated and I remember I almost ran away one night. Everyone was asleep and I walked to our bathroom door which exited over a seven foot drop (there had been another room there, but it was torn down) and I opened the door, stepped on the ledge, and pulled the door closed. I was in a nightgown, and barefoot. I’d jumped off that ledge playing or just to get where I needed to go many times, and since I knew for sure that my parents were both asleep I doubted I would wake them up by falling.
And I stood there, seeing the moonlight coming through the trees. We were planning to go to Riverbend the next day (I think planning for that trip was what triggered Dad’s autistic meltdown earlier that day which saw me getting beat and screamed at for hours) and despite the violence, I could feel and sense the excitement of my family in the other room. Mom and Ariel very seldom got any chances to do fun things like this, and I remember wondering while I stood out there if me running away meant that they would cancel the trip. What a conundrum, haha. I had no plans of where to go, but since I lived in the woods I was pretty sure I could deal with whatever. (I’m still sure that I could have. I was a fucking badass kid.)
When I turned away from the open edge of the house and the moonlight and back toward that prison of a house I was sobbing. Silently, but still sobbing. I stayed awake for hours just crying, knowing that my sanity was going to be ground down further because the moment that my adrenaline was high enough to actually do the crazy stupid ridiculous thing that would help me, my love and concern for my family told me to stop. And I listened.
And you know? Riverbend was pretty fun, all things considered. It made me feel wonderful to see everyone having so much fun. I felt like I'd chosen correctly.
And the violence escalated.
When I did leave, you could argue that my parents would never have actually killed me…that I still had a choice and made it. But I don’t see it that way. I had no agency and there was not a single part of my life that I had adequate control of. The torture and threats of more torture were clear enough that my overloaded brain correctly propelled my body the FUCK out of there that same night. I’ll say forever, I didn’t have a choice. I felt no courage. Fighting for your life isn't courage, it's a fucking involuntary thing where something inside you (your Richard Parker) comes out and takes charge and you have zero input about it.
The interesting thing is, what happens when you’re an adult? Like, when does choice start? I have done a lot of weird, pointless, stupid, cringey things as an adult that I know were just bad choices. Some of them felt like they weren't choices at the time. And that’s what trauma and ADHD does. When you feel the urge to flee or fight or fuck or some other self-preservation thing, you just pluck up and do it without much thought, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Some things that I did felt like addictions I was unable to stop--the epitome of not having a choice. Someone else in the driver’s seat, calling the shots. And yet whoever was in that driver's seat was absolutely not a Richard Parker. The fight for my life was not ON in the same way it had been when I was a child.
So for my adult "felt like I didn't have a choice" choices, I still maintain the vibe that I made those choices. I take responsibility for my parts, and don’t take responsibility for the bullshit that isn’t mine. I forgive myself for whatever self-sabotage I come up with and just try to keep being better. I don’t think in adulthood I have ever had such an intense, life-changing moment where I “Didn’t have a choice.”
It’s hard to hear people who won’t leave marriages or won’t change jobs or won’t do this or that thing because they “Don’t have a choice.” The stupid trigger that made me post this whole ponderation was someone saying they didn’t have a choice to give someone in their family a house key. Like bro, that’s always a choice, it’s your FUCKING HOUSE. But again, under duress….did she feel that survivor’s panic? What do I know about her trauma? Why do I care either way? Why does one just irritate the absolute hell out of me?
Part of my psychology is wanting to see people be at their best, and maybe getting a little drill-sergeanty when I can see their best and they’re not at it. The problem with this is of course that I have absolutely no say in the reality of their best, and that I’m very good at putting character traits and colorful narratives onto people I know, turning them into CHAMPIONS to be molded. I might just write too much fiction, I don’t know. I really can intuit things about people that they themselves see or want, or things they want to change, but my brain takes those seeds and runs with them into "if you wanted to, you could ______. WITH MY HELP, WE CAN GET THERE EVEN FASTER. I'VE GOT YOU." (I am insufferable.)
I always maintain that people do what they’re capable of, and usually not much more. To see growth and transformation and change especially after generational trauma is a lot to hope for, and I acknowledge that people never get there and that’s okay. They’re still cool either way. When people start with “I had no choice” I feel that they are speaking their truth. Whether or not I agree. So I have thus far not slapped anyone yet for using the words that make parts of me cringe.
A dark and cynical part of me wonders if it has something to do with courage. Courage may just mean making choices when things are shitty, and owning those choices. And not having a choice, instead acting on pressure or doing what you’re told, is the loss of or absence of courage. So your boss tells you to work extra and you don’t tell him to eat shit--you may feel like you don’t have a choice, but what you really don’t have is courage.
Is that a thing? Is it awful to say that this applies to things like abused spouses…? Or someone trying to overcome addiction? The thing is, when people talk about getting out of those bad situations the sensations and mindspace they describe has nothing to do with courage. It's the tiger. Tigers are killing machines, they don't really have courage. I don't think a peak predator needs something like that. They have other things.
And in making these big, terrifying changes, the courage usually comes after. It's when you really commit to the choice and work through it. You know, after the adrenaline wears off and you're still trying. That is the part that involves courage, and it almost always involves choices. I feel like if someone is TRYING to fix their situation then they are trying to find that choice, thus they must have some courage they're also trying to find. Me standing at the door that night was me coming nose to nose with my own courage, and the choice I made to neglect it was what made me so fucking sad.
In short I guess, my concept of courage has nothing to do with survival-instinct reaction. It has everything to do with choices that are going to have some shitty side effects, and wading through them. Sometimes 'I had no choice' sounds like a cop-out to me and I want to see people stand up for themselves. Which is silly, and I do nothing to encourage this behavior. I just stew on in internally while saying something dumb like "I'm here for you, whatever you need." It's their life.
For me becoming an adult was the best fucking thing I ever experienced. I know people wax nostalgic about childhood and I promise, I do as well--I tell happy stories from my childhood all the time. But I always knew, DEEP in my soul that things would change for me when I grew up. I would not listen to any more dipshit soul-sucking idiotic adults who thought they knew what was best for me and knew nothing about me. The absolutely wild thing about that is how right I was.
Here I sit, 35, a parent, and I can honestly say that the vast majority of adults “caring” for me were incompetent at best. That is INSANE to think about. If I went back in time and appeared next to eight year old Alex, doodling Mike Nesmith and said “Listen, your spite for anyone over age 30 is SO warranted, don’t trust these jackasses farther than you can throw them because they don’t know anything about you and only want to control you, they think far less of you than your true worth” …like I’d be dumbfounded. And depressed. Also vindicated. We’re all manipulated into thinking that adults just know something we don’t as children. LIES. Big, dumb, stupid, boomer lie culture.
So yeah, my only experience with not having a choice was right on the cusp of my entrance to adulthood, when my parents seemed to sense that they were losing control of me (and my respect) and they put me in a position where my survival felt threatened. The hazy earlier memories of childhood also involved a lot of powerless moments and not having choices, but adulthood really changed gears for me.
It’s odd to hear people who are adults say they don’t have choices. I guess that’s all.
I'll end with another quote about choices, from Randall Clark's last journal entry:
"Maybe the only point of all this living was to keep those pictures in my head going for as long as I could...It wasn't choice. I chose to die again and again. Just never did. Body had its own drive.
Well, the little ones will need it. Species will need it if it's to continue. That blind drive onward.'