This post was originally posted on 8/30/2020, on my other site The Untucked Life. I have since shut that down and moved all of that content to this site.

Today is my birthday. 36.

Four days ago I was sitting in an IT closet waiting for a tech from the cable company… they were two hours late. I was sitting on a small metal chair with my laptop perched on top of a fold out table. All I could hear were basketballs bouncing on the gym floor, there must have been hundreds of basketballs and I know they were being bounced exceptionally hard just for dramatic effect. Tears in my eyes, I look up to see a roach fly off the wall and crawl across the floor in front of me.

Just a few minutes earlier I received a phone call from my doctor. He is an older fellow but well regarded as a specialist of the hand and wrist. I visited him about a month ago as my wrist was just not getting better from my accident in March. I wanted to get a second opinion. After some self education on wrist injuries I was convinced that the bones in my arm were not aligned properly. Maybe I was crazy or maybe he would see the same thing.

Surgery.

He said a lot of things on that phone call but surgery was the big one. Basically, there is a tendon that runs down the back of my forearm that is out of place, my bones are misaligned and I have a tear of a really important intersection of cartilage. The news was not surprising. It was actually affirming. There at least was a path now as long as I stayed the course.

At that moment, the combination of being in the same closet for the 4th day in a row while I meet yet another technician to figure out what is wrong with their service to hopefully complete this network upgrade that hasn’t been touched since 2013, with tears in my eyes at the thought of starting over in my recovery and a stupid mask that only highlights the fact that I was crying and these basketball players, how dare they bounce those balls so aggressively as if to tease me because I in fact cannot shoot a basketball right now… it was just too much. Somehow the world is plotting against me and watching me struggle, in a closet, with a roach.

The technician shows up.

Against all of my natural instincts to somehow equalize the unfairness of my current situation by being excessively aggravated with this technician and taking out on him 4 days worth of frustration… I don’t.

I ask him how his day has been… he tells me and then we chat about organizational politics and how crazy things are right now. I explain to him the situation with just the facts and the timeline. I am not pointing fingers or blaming him or ‘them’ but trying to enlighten him so we can resolve the issue.

“I really need your help.”

An hour later it is fixed. He re-ran a line and swapped out the modem. He even explained to me how to do some signal loss calculations based on the distance of the run.

What does this story have to do with my birthday?

This is what getting older has meant for me. The ability to think. Think about what I am feeling, about my thoughts… about the narrative I am telling myself regarding my current situation. And then choose. I choose what to believe. I choose the narrative. I choose my story.

This has been a very difficult year for all of us. I don’t know what your personal situation is but I know your life has changed with the pandemic. Maybe you lost your job. Maybe you lost someone you care about. Maybe you had an accident this year, like I did. Maybe you also need to have surgery for something, like I do. Maybe you are freaking out about sending your kids back to in-person school. These are all hard things.

Life is hard right now. But life will always be hard. It just gets hard for different reasons.

However, I can tell you that in every situation you find yourself in… you are the author. You get to decide. Will you write a story that makes you a weak victim, wronged by the world and its unfairness? Or will you write a story filled with gratitude and hope and take every obstacle as an opportunity to prove to yourself, once again, that ‘You can do hard things.’

So instead of doing 36 more things to keep with the theme from last years 35 Things at 35. I will only add 1.

36. Choose your story.

For more on choosing your story check out this podcast episode.

– Nate