Dreamer

Happy Friday dreamers!

So, apparently, I start to enjoy the daily prompt if I have two articles in a row written with it as inspiration!

And today’s topic made me reflect on all the choices I made in life, not only on what I would put in a box called sacrifice. Because, since we develop consciousness, and we start to think for ourselves, we start to make decisions.

We sacrifice sleep to be with our parents on New Year’s, we sacrifice our sandwich to share with a colleague who doesn’t have something to eat, and we sacrifice those amazing new pants only to go down the slide. Then we start to sacrifice more, like the homework for that new episode of our favorite cartoon, (later in life we sacrifice chores, sleep, and maybe task for our favorite TV shows, like everyone who postponed everything for Poilin Brigeton, me included).

Then we sacrifice time with family to go out with high school friends, then we sacrifice one career over another, one love for peace and sanity, another for growing up, and some for our own good. Friendships are in the same boat. Experiences, places, belongings, life!

But is it really a choice or sacrifice is real?

According to my beloved Cambridge dictionary, a sacrifice is considered:

• to give up something for something else is considered more important

Or

• the act of giving up something that is valuable to you in order to help someone else:

So it’s either to give up on something more important to you or to give something to someone else!

In none of the cases isn’t stated that sacrifice comes as a form of obligation nor that it must come with regret. However, many refer to sacrifice as the time they invested in something (like child raising), money (like children’s needs or let’s not say only children but down payments to a home), or life directions (sacrificed family life for a career or vice-versa).

To me, all of them are choices. Simply choices we made. And every single choice will bring up another set of choices, and another, and another, to be honest, until our last breath or in some cases, until our last conscious moment.

We chose to sacrifice our sleep for the money our job provides us, with which we pay the mortgage on our home we decided to buy instead of rent, which we had since college because the dorm life wasn’t good enough for good grades that ensured this career we have (that pays the mortgage) and that we choose in high school, and made us leave hometown where we had a place to stay, and a job that paid, even if it wasn’t our dream career.

And I could go on and on with this example, but I think you got the point: everything we might call a sacrifice, is a response to a choice we made before, and a starting point to other so-called sacrifices. We made a choice at some point that today might give us a hard time and to think it’s a sacrifice!

The only real sacrifice I think we make, it’s when it’s totally out of our choice or control, like natural events: hurricanes, flooding, fires, storms. And even there it might be questionable cause sometimes we decided to be there in the first place at that moment.

Yet, other times, things are really out of our control: missed flights, traffic out of nowhere, broken cars, no phone service and many, many other things, that are truly out of control, that have a probability of happening very low, and they guide us to hard choices, to sacrifices. To stay or to live, to run or to help, to scream or to be punished? I think these are the real sacrifices!

Besides those examples, there are times, when it looks like the universe is playing games with us and it makes us have the same choice over and over again! Some will say that we need to choose differently! I think I agree, in a way…

I think that we do have free will in many aspects of our lives, and this is why we have so many choices to make. But I also think that the bigger picture is predestined. A while ago I wanted to write an article called ” What if” inspired by an episode in Grey’s Anatomy that was so fff-ing related to this topic: choices and sacrifices. I couldn’t write it.

It should have been about the decisions that I took that at that point looked like a sacrifice that changed my life, but now, I know that this is how it should’ve been from the start!

Sacrifices I made

• I choose Science in high school. I really wanted something easier deep down, but I couldn’t admit that cause it would’ve been “that I’m lazy”. For a while, I doubted I could make it.
• I choose to spend time with my friends over classmates. I ended up being marginalized and not included in the class group and being seen in many ways, and bullied. However, some of my friends are still here and they are like family, the classmates? I don’t give an f.
• I choose a different city to go to college than my then-boyfriend. I cried like hell then and felt alone, and depressed. Then I found what I was really looking for in that city that now is almost like home to me, while my ex-boyfriend quit college, and got a job non-related to what he should’ve done.
• I choose to go to see him, instead of bonding with my colleagues or going home to my family. Then I saw the choices he made, but I also understood that I didn’t want to give up my life to only see him and to move to his city.
• I choose to give up on that relationship for me. Many would say that I could’ve been married by now, as he is married for a year already! I don’t think so, truth being said, that relationship mostly taught me what to avoid in the future. And I am grateful now, even if then I was in tears.
• I chose to study something that it was free, instead of going for what I really wanted, cause I didn’t want to put financial pressure on my family. And boy, when it hit me that that was supposed to happen from the beginning, it was so relieving. But I hated it in college and I was low-key jealous of everyone who really studied PR. Still, my now job is related to college, my PhD supervisor is married to one of my job colleagues, and another job colleague who became my friend is someone who also has the same degree as me. And I also do PR at my teaching job.

And many more! So what if I choose differently? I think that fate would’ve made it that way that I would be still here writing this article one day, even if I had broken up with my high school boyfriend in 2018, in 2016 when I had chosen a different city, or if I would’ve chosen his City, I think I would’ve moved to Brasov eventually, and I would’ve still become a teacher. The future is yet to be expected.

At the end of the day, there were many choices that I made, that at some point I felt to be sacrifices, but it was shown to be only fate guiding me to something bigger already planned. The rest, the small ones, are just details!

So yeah, without being entitled, I will say that in 26 years, I made a lot of choices, some hard, some easy, cause all the choices are subjective depending on everyone is standing, but I don’t think I’ve been put in front of a real life-depending on its sacrifice. And I also think that some of them are just fate….

What about you? Let me know and of course, have #adreamerlife!

Cristiana Apreutese