Have you ever looked back over your life and wondered,
“Why did I make that decision?”
For years, I judged myself by my choices.
I thought my life was simply a series of bad decisions.
What I didn’t understand was that decisions rarely appear out of nowhere.
They have roots.
Sometimes those roots are planted in childhood.
Sometimes they’re watered by rejection, abandonment, betrayal, or grief.
Sometimes they’re hidden beneath years of silence.
As I’ve been writing my memoir, For the People, I’ve been forced to revisit parts of my life that I spent years trying to forget. It hasn’t been easy, but it has taught me something I wish I had understood much earlier.
Before we can change our decisions, we often have to understand what shaped them.
That doesn’t excuse the choices we’ve made.
We’re still responsible for them.
But understanding the “why” behind our decisions gives us the opportunity to choose differently moving forward.
For me, healing didn’t begin when I stopped using drugs.
Healing began when I became willing to ask myself difficult questions.
What was I believing about myself?
Why did I think I deserved so little?
Where did those beliefs come from?
Those questions led me toward forgiveness.
Not just forgiving other people.
Forgiving myself.
I’ve also learned that we inherit more than eye color and family traditions.
Sometimes we inherit silence.
Sometimes we inherit fear.
Sometimes we inherit unhealthy ways of coping with pain.
The beautiful part is this:
Just because something was passed down to us doesn’t mean it has to be passed on through us.
We have the power to interrupt unhealthy patterns.
We have the power to heal.
And we have the power to leave a different legacy for those who come after us.
So today, I’d like to leave you with one question:
What pattern in your life are you willing to break?
Sometimes healing begins with that one honest answer.
— Clarisis Green
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