Product of Your Desires
By
Matt Kroczaleski
You hear people talk all the time about how someone is a product of
his or her environment. This is almost always the case when someone
has done something wrong, and the argument is used as an excuse for
the person as if they had no choice in the matter other than to
become what their environment leads them to be. As you may have
surmised by now, and if you know me at all, I'm certain you've
figured out that I wholeheartedly disagree with this kind of
thinking.
If this line of thinking were true, I would have dropped out of high
school, gotten into drugs and become a full-fledged alcoholic. I
would never have accomplished anything and blamed everyone and
everything else for my failures, as this was what the environment
that I grew up in was most conducive to producing. Now, I'm not
saying that your environment has no effect on you whatsoever, but
what I am saying is that everything in life boils down to choice,
and the power to choose lies within the individual.
Certain situations may greatly increase the difficulty of the
choice, but the choice remains the same. The first thing a person
must do is assume all responsibility for everything that has
happened or has failed to happen to them. Once you adopt this as
your primary philosophy for governing your life, you become
empowered to see that you and you alone decide your future through
the choices you make. Yes, bad things may happen to you that appear
to be beyond your control (developing testicular cancer was one such
occurrence for me), and you may not always be able to control those
instances, but you can always control how you react to them. You can
see them as learning experiences and grow from them to become
something bigger and better, or you can use them as excuses that
will ultimately hold you back from reaching your true potential and
lead you down a path to mediocrity or worse.
It has been this attitude of believing that my choices directly
impact my quality of life that has helped me to fight through
adversity throughout my life. As a child I was surrounded by
drinking and drug use and could have easily gone down that path
myself, but I had many goals from a very young age, and through
observation I knew that these things would only inhibit me from
achieving what I wanted. So I made a conscious decision, a choice,
to avoid them. I also grew up poor, in an area of the state that was
rife with poverty, and was led to believe that wealthy people were
somehow privileged and that their success was due to their inherent
advantages that I did not have access to. As I grew up and observed
the people around me, however, I noticed that the harder a person
worked, the more success they had, and that for the most part,
successful people just worked harder than less successful people.
Of course, there are many more factors that play into economic
prosperity, but I truly believe the single most important factor to
be hard work, and there is no disputing the fact that hard work is a
choice that anyone can make for themselves. As the words imply, hard
work is difficult, and many people would rather make excuses and
externalize the responsibility instead of claiming it for their own
and simply owning up to the fact that their lives are substandard
because they have chosen the path of least resistance and taken the
easy way out. Throughout their lives, they have always made the
choice that presented the least challenge and their results are
clearly indicative of this. It's also much easier to temporarily
escape your problems with alcohol or drugs than it is to get to work
solving them, and as such, the allure for many people is one that is
difficult to resist.
I have been through some shitty stuff in my life. I know what it’s
like to have to wrestle a loaded gun away from the head of someone
you love to prevent them from shooting themselves. I know what it’s
like to have to go out into the woods in the dead of winter and have
to break up branches to heat your home because there isn’t enough
money to buy firewood. I know what it’s like to sit helpless in the
passenger seat of a car while it careens at eighty-plus miles per
hour down a dirt road crashing through the brush on the side of the
road heading straight for a head-on collision with a large oak tree,
with the driver so wasted drunk that he likely had no memory of it
the next day. I experienced all of these things during my
adolescence, and to be honest, these are far from the most difficult
things I have had to deal with in my life.
I know what it’s like to contemplate suicide because my problems
seemed so horrible, so insurmountable, that they appeared to have no
discernible answers I could fathom. I felt completely alone in the
world with them, and the only thing I desired was for the pain to
stop. I know what it’s like to feel all of this on the inside and
yet walk through life presenting myself on the outside as if nothing
was wrong. I used to hate when people would ask me, “How are you?”
and even though I knew the question was really just a greeting, it
still bothered me that I felt compelled to put on a fake smile and
lie by answering, “Good, how are you?” when I really wanted to
reply, “Well, things are so dark and horrible right now that I was
actually just contemplating what it would be like to eat a lead
sandwich.”
Now, I’m not sharing these things looking for some kind of sympathy
or pity. I loathe pity, and honestly there are many, many people out
there that have had far rougher lives than I have. I only share
these experiences so that other people that are going through tough
times can relate and see that all things are possible if you’re
willing to work hard enough for them and to persevere when things
are at their worst. I can also say with 100% honesty that I truly
feel fortunate to have experienced all of the things I have in life.
Adversity makes us stronger. My biggest fear with my own children is
that their lives are too easy and that they will have a very hard
time coping with difficult things in life when they inevitably run
into them.
I could have used all of my difficult experiences as excuses to not
achieve anything, as so many people often do, but instead I chose to
learn from them and used them to make myself a stronger person. I
chose to use the poor choices I observed to help me make better
choices. And even in my darkest times, when it seemed like there
were no answers to my problems, no key to my lock, I made the choice
to never take the path of least resistance and to always work hard
toward achieving my goals. You can do the same. So make the choice
not to be a product of your environment, but rather a product of
your desires. And while I can’t promise you that it will be easy (it
most certainly will not), I can promise you that it will be worth
it.
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