We don’t hear a lot about personal responsibility and accountability anymore, or at least, I don’t online and I didn’t on my college campus. It’s an easy thing to try and brush off, nobody wants to take full responsibility for their life. It’s so much easier to blame things on circumstances. After all, our circumstance did effect us, why shouldn’t we blame our choices on them?

The whole problem with that is despite how we were raised, what happened to us in the past, or what other people think of us, our choices are still up to us. Every decision we make we are responsible for. It’s time we start owning up to that, because by saying that we aren’t in control of the bad things we admit that we’re not in control of the good things, because whether you like it or not, it’s a two way street, and to say your not in control of anything… well, that’s a flat out lie.

We know it’s a lie because we see people conquer the same circumstances that we face regularly. We constantly hear people own up to their mistakes, their bad decisions, their regrets. We know it’s possible, but we still excuse ourselves for the same things. We freeze before going into the so grossly overused “it’s different!” defense.

We’ve been saying that for years, when are we going to realize that it’s not a good enough excuse? When are we going to pick ourselves up, when are we going to stop blaming everyone but ourselves?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot when it comes to my own life and a lot of the choices I’ve made. I’ve excused a lot of things on circumstances out of my control without acknowledging that how I reacted to those circumstances was completely within it.

I don’t want to live a life based on excuses, even if they make me feel better. I want to be able to own up to my bad choices in a way that lets me know that I won’t make them again. Nobody has to live with my life choices but me, so why am I pretending that other people and outside events are the ones that get to make those choices?

This isn’t something that we can magically rid from our lives in one day, in fact it’s something that we’re going to have to start addressing every single day. Every time we say “I had no choice” we need to ask ourselves if that’s really true. We have to ask ourselves that over and over again till we get so we’re asking it before we make decisions to begin with. That’s the only way we can end the cycle.

We’re responsible for ourselves, it’s time we act like it.