Somewhere along the way, in between all those times you thought it was the real thing, where you believed that love could conquer all, where you gave away your beautiful heart and soul to someone who you believed would eventually come around and make a commitment to you, you've come to believe that there’s only one possible explanation for your fate: you’re a victim.

I know it seems so much easier. Blaming your fate on everything else, telling yourself your sad story over and over again. It can even seem romantic in a strange sort of way.

Waiting to be rescued and believing in that fairy tale can keep you living like this for a long, long time. It can keep you from living at all for a long, long time.

And while this might seem like an accurate assessment, and you hold onto it even tighter whenever someone starts to question it, what happens when you believe something like this, my beautiful friend, is that you do yourself an even greater injustice.

You are closing yourself in.

You sentence yourself to this story and you put yourself in a very closed box.

This isn't your story. This isn't your fate.

You’re no damsel in distress, my beautiful friend. You’re not a tragic heroine in an epic fairy tale. You’re not a lady in waiting.

It might make for a great romantic story and give you something to keep holding onto, but it’s not your story.

We forgot.

Somewhere along the way we got lost. We forgot that we are doing the choosing. We forgot that we don't need to prove anything to anyone. We forgot that we have a say. We forgot that we can set our own boundaries and our own terms for our relationships and we can refuse to settle for any treatment that doesn't honor and respect the beautiful women we are. We forgot these truths.

You’re not a victim.

You don’t need to be rescued. 

We've all, at one time or another, chosen men who we've believed in but turned out to be something different than we thought they were. We've all gotten caught up in the belief that love conquers all.  We've all wanted to believe that it does. It might seem so much easier to give our power away like this, to put this all on something else so that we don’t have to take the blame. But in the process of doing this, something else happens.

We take away our ability to change it.

You see, my beautiful friend, what happens when you believe this, when you believe that you're a victim, when you put it on all bad luck, or a curse, or fate, or whatever other story you've been telling yourself for so long, you also deprive yourself of the choice you have to take your power back and create a life of your own choosing.

I know it’s hard not to defend your right to keep thinking like this. Of why you know this is true and that no one understands this. Of why your situation is different. And that’s OK if that’s where you’re at right now. It’s enough to simply entertain this thought, to hear an idea like this that might give you something to think about today or another day.

Because when you catch a glimpse of what your life could be like, when you sense that slight glimmer of hope that there might be a different way, this thought - this little nudge - will always still be right here waiting for you.

No matter who you are, what your past has been like, what kind of situation you are in right now, you can choose what you are going to do next. You can choose your own path forward. You can choose to change your circumstances, starting right now.

You are doing the choosing.