Radical Responsibility

The other day I was driving to the gym when the words radical responsibility came to me.

To me, this is the idea that in everything I do, in everything that happens to me, I get to choose how I respond. It’s also the idea that I almost always have far more power than I think I do.

In the world of work, for instance, it’s recognizing that if I don’t like what my manager says, I have the free will to respond rather than just silently accept it. If I don’t like the typical way of doing things, I can choose to do things another way. If I don’t like the work environment, I have the free will to move on to something else. If I don’t like the work itself, I have the free will to choose a new line of work.

Realizing that is honestly a little bit terrifying.

Because all of those are a kind of scary. They’re challenging, take time and effort, and potentially have some not so fun consequences.  I’d much rather believe I’m trapped with no hope of escape and complain about it instead.

Complaining feels like you’re doing something about your situation without actually doing anything about it, so its incredibly alluring. It becomes the easy way out when there’s a difficult decision to be made—especially when that decision is filled with uncertainty and potential consequences—because it lets your brain believe that you are a victim. You’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. It’s not fair. But what can you do? Nothing, other than tell everyone who will listen how unfair it is.

That’s the part that really hit me on that drive. The idea that I so very often make myself feel powerless by giving into the temptation to embrace victimhood as my identity.

If I can get anything through my head in writing this, it’s that just because something is challenging, time-consuming, uncertain, and scary doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Only I have the power to make something impossible.

As proof of that, I think of someone like Alexei Navalny. Deciding to oppose Putin politically was incredibly terrifying and risky, and he paid the price for doing so by getting arrested and poisoned multiple times. But he knew that as long as he was breathing, there was always an option to push back. He wasn’t a helpless victim. And that’s exactly what he did.

In comparison, finding work that feels fulfilling feels like a walk in the park.

A large part of what contributes to that feeling that something is impossible is that I’m not always great at discerning what else in my life contributes to that temptation to give up and complain. This includes:

• Numbing myself through mindless activities so I don’t have free space to process what I’m feeling and listen for next steps
• Filling my head with doom-heavy information so I’m biased to believe there’s no hope
• Listening to the shoulds in my head and holding them as truths rather than what my body and intuition are telling me
• Spiraling in the what ifs rather than grounding myself in what’s really happening in the present

Quite frankly, there is as much comfort in these as there is in complaining because they all contribute to the idea that I don’t have to make difficult or scary choices, break the status quo, or challenge my beliefs so I can grow. They’re familiar. They all reinforce that I’m stuck.

So it’s up to me to choose again and again if I’m going to remain stuck in what feels safe but disempowering, or if I’m going to take radical responsibility.

There’s an eclipse in Virgo today which invites us to shed what’s no longer serving us. There’s a lot that scares me about giving up complaining because it’s such a nice shield to hide behind. But something tells me that’s one of the things I need to start to shed if I’m going to keep moving forward on my journey. That’s not to say it’ll never happen again—expecting perfection, after all, is a great way to set myself up for failure. But if I can cut my complaining and all the habits that lead into it down to even half of what they are now, how much farther will I be this time next year?

I can’t wait to find out.