Messy Life, Honest Life

“This book is dedicated to those who lack the freedom to choose their own suffering and their own hope.” – Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S

This dedication resonates with me for a few reasons.

People often say we have freedom of choice, yet the more I think about it, the less free it feels. In the end, there seem to be only two real choices: to live or to die. Everything else is simply a means of moving toward one of those ends.

Maybe what makes us believe in freedom is the act of choosing itself. We fill our days with countless small choices, such as what to eat, what to wear, and how to spend our time. These choices give us a sense of control and freedom, a comfort that allows us to believe we can do whatever we want and still end up where we hope to be. Yet not everyone begins from the same place. Some people have to fight just to reach the starting line, while others are already halfway to the finish. As life grows heavier and the stakes rise, the circle of choice slowly tightens, and what once felt wide and full of possibility becomes narrow and defined by necessity.

Some people make choices not because they are truly theirs, but because they drift with the current, following social pressure, expectations, and the image others expect from them. We all make choices shaped by others, whether through family, culture, or the quiet pull of belonging. The danger is that, over time, these borrowed choices begin to shape our lives in ways we never intended. Slowly, we trade parts of ourselves away to keep the peace.

The consequences of choices made by others for me, or the ones I made because of others, are the hardest to process. When I make a choice for myself, I have already weighed the risks and accepted the possible impact. If that choice leads to suffering or hardship, I can process it, learn from it, and even grow through it. The weight feels smaller because I was prepared for it, even if it is never easy.

If hope is not truly mine, it becomes meaningless and powerless. Real hope has strength only when it grows from something personal, something we have chosen to believe in, something into which we have poured our own meaning. Without that, I do not know what it is, but it is not hope.

Some of us are lucky enough to make those choices freely. Some of us feel the pressure but learn to resist it. And some of us live under the constant weight of others’ expectations, making decisions that are not really ours. Over time, we might even lose sight of what we truly want. We forget who we are beneath all those borrowed choices.

Personally, I do not mind the journey of limited choices. In a way, I am grateful for what I have and try to make the most of what life has given me. The limits I face are not only obstacles but challenges that invite me to think differently. I have learned to see them not as walls that stop me, but as paths that ask me to look for another way forward. A limit can feel like loss at first, yet within it, there is often the quiet possibility of something new.

Maybe freedom is not about having endless choices, but about finding meaning, even within the limits we cannot escape.