Choose.

Pick a card - any card. 

BUT WAIT - before you pick a card you should know that all of the available cards contain shitty situations.  These situations will require effort on your part to improve them; to mold them into something that you can live with.  You should also know that in order to change your current situation, you must pick one of these cards; life is what unfolds based on the choices you make along the way. 

How do you choose?  Will you choose to avoid the game altogether and thereby check out of life?  Avoid the risk?  Deny yourself the chance to turn a shitty situation into something slighty better than death ...possibly wonderful ....perhaps delightful?  This is your chance.  Pick a card.  What do you do?

I have an entire deck of shitty choices in front of me right now.  I left my old life behind when I crashed - the money, colleagues, social circles - all gone and forever altered.  If you leave the game people rarely hold your hand as you exit. 

A choice must be made.  This choice will change the course of my life and require a great deal of effort on my part.  Do I have the strength?  Probably not, but I'll have to find it anyway.  Any move you make requires at least some forward momentum, no matter how slight.

Do I choose to barely make it and live as a victim to my diagnoses?

I have been advised by my doctors and therapist that my old career is over - I will not be able to work in such a high-stress environment ever again.  If I choose disability, I choose a life of abject poverty - of trying to live on $1,000 a month. 

Do I choose to ignore my diagnoses and try to join the old game?

I could ignore the advice of my doctors and therapist and push it all down - like I used to do - and head back out to the playground.  It hasn't been that long - I could do it.  How long before I lose it all again, and will I survive the next fall?

Do I choose to take a new, risky road? 

I could choose to do something that I've never done before, but that takes a great deal of effort and a solid commitment to see things through.  I'd be pulling up my own bootstraps during the weakest time of my life.  If I fail, I fail hard and without a net
. 
Do I choose to take a few steps back and accept something less than what I had before?

I could choose to take a job with less stress, money, responsibility  ... everything - something slightly better than poverty and mind-numbingly boring. 


The one thing that all of these choices have in common is that they require me to push back against my illnesses, and that is what lead to this current crisis.  I have no idea what to do.  At this point I feel that I should start small and work my way back.  Unfortunately, the world does not wait for the weakest of the herd and I will likely never make it back.

Ladies and Gentlemen:  Allow me to introduce you to just some of the challenges facing individuals suffering from any sort of illness.  The choices are never easy, but if you want to LIVE you must CHOOSE.