Every day, when you wake up in the morning, you make a choice: get out of bed or lie back, what to do first - wash your face or have breakfast, notice your discomfort or ignore it. You choose: to notice the invigorating coolness of a humid morning or the dampness of the looming rain clouds, ready to ruin all your plans. Life is an endless series of small and large choices, and if sometimes it seems to you that you can refuse the choice or shift it onto the shoulders of another, then you are mistaken. Whatever you decide, it is also a choice. Is yours. Sometimes it may seem that your fate is predetermined: “My father drank, my grandfather drank, my great-grandfather... This means that I am going there too. Resistance is futile". “My grandmother was unhappy in her marriage, my mother suffered all her life with a worthless husband, not knowing joy... What can I hope for?” However, your destiny is also your choice. It is impossible to foresee all the events of this life; you will have to face not only joy and pleasure, but also pain, cruelty, disappointment, and loss. Yes, you can’t predict it, but you can choose how to live with it, how to use the experience gained. You can ignore, not notice and, without admitting it to yourself, wait for an explosion. Or acknowledge it, live it, agree that it happened in your life, and move on! We must admit that taking responsibility for your destiny can be difficult, and sometimes it seems completely impossible. Especially if there is no suitable example. Making your own decisions and taking responsibility for it is a skill developed in the family. If a child does not see how his parents do it, if he is not given freedom of choice, there is a chance that the skill will not be developed. And then a person “goes with the flow”, it is difficult for him to notice his desires and needs, which makes it almost impossible to defend his boundaries - both psychological and real, physical. In this case, the chances of living someone else's fate increase. If you are unlucky enough to grow up in a family where you were not taught to make conscious decisions and be responsible for them, this is not a reason to give up. High-quality psychological or psychotherapeutic work will help you develop this skill and free yourself for your life, for your destiny. A psychologist/psychotherapist is a person who accepts you with all your difficulties, imperfections, fears, pain, rage, despair, timidity, weakness. He may disagree with something, but he doesn’t devalue it, he helps you notice and accept it all in yourself. The paradox is that without seeing your weak, “shadow” sides, it is not possible to notice and accept your strong, “light” sides. And then it is impossible to use your personal resources to become more confident, stable, happier. Maybe now is the time to choose?