Reverb12 Day Sixteen: Adult Choices

tyunglebower ♦ December 16, 2012 ♦ 2 Comments

From DailyAngst:

Being an adult means making your own choices.  What choices were the hardest to make this year?

Hard choices are sometimes things that make your life better, not worse. My difficult choice was a simply and productive one, but against the grain of my day to day.

Early this year I chose to join a local writers group. It’s the first time I ever been in one. (I know, I know.)

Why on earth should this have been hard? One reason I have already alluded to; I had never done it before. Yet what else about this choice to move in a different direction with some of my time and my writing made doing so difficult.

It isn’t the idea of people reading my writing. People have read my writing before, both fiction and non-fiction. So while having it reviewed right away did take some getting used to, that isn’t what made the choice a difficult one. The difficulty lie in the fact that it was counter to my inertia.

I like people sometimes. And some people I like all of the time. But compared to the average, I am not the most social person. I rarely hold my own events, and when I do they are poorly attended. I am rarely invited to things other people hold, and when I am for a while, they tend to dismiss me without reason, based on their own superiority complexes. (Many of my recently but no longer best friends in nearby West Virginia have done this to me in the last year.) So I’m not out and about with people often, except for when I am in a play. I’m not used to it. Throw in to hurt I have suffered in the times I have tried to do so, and you see why I was reluctant to take on a new group of people.

And I mean cold. As in I knew nobody even casually in this writing group when I first showed up hoping to improve my writing and make some friends. My writing has improved somewhat, and the jury is still out on the friends part. I honestly don’t know if any of them consider me a friend at this point or not. I know that I am eccentric, at times awkward and usually reserved in the meetings as a whole, so there would be plenty of reasons for them to be unsure of what to make of me, even after nine months of attendance. I may not be sure for a while.

But it is for all of those reasons that making this new effort back in March as a difficult decision for me to make. So why did I make the choice to join this group?

Part of the answer is in today’s prompt; being an adult means making your own choices. It was a point in time wherein I had decided as an adult can, that a change in direction was needed. That what I was doing wasn’t working and that despite the uncertainty involved in this new venture I had to at least subject myself to it a few times, so as to say I had attempted to extricate myself from the rut that perceived was forming in my life. Adults make choices about their lives, and though difficult, joining the writing group is a choice that I don’t regret making.