Life Is What You Make It

“So I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we’ll never know most of them. But even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.”

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Friday I attended a talk by author Stephen Chbosky. At one point in his talk, he focused on Charlie, the protagonist of his book and film The Perks of Being a Wallflower. He said that he wanted to portray Charlie as the nicest person in the world. Charlie is someone that everyone should love. He’s kind, generous and loving. He accepts people as they are and consciously works at refraining from judging people. He’s open-minded and honest and trustworthy. His life should be perfect. And yet that is far from the truth.

Charlie has suffered greatly at the hands of his family. As a small child, he was sexually abused by his Aunt Helen. Somehow, the rest of the family was totally oblivious to this big white elephant disrupting their household. Charlie has consciously blocked-out the abuse, although his entire life is still affected by it. To make matters worse, his Aunt Helen was tragically killed in a car accident as she was returning from buying Charlie a birthday present. He was about five years old when this happened, but as a high school freshman, he’s still carrying the belief—and the guilt—that he’s responsible for his aunt’s death. He remembers his Aunt Helen as the one person he could really relate to and he thinks of her as the person he loved the most.

Charlie enters high school friendless. He had one very good childhood friend, Michael, but Michael committed suicide. So Charlie enters high school with his all-too-short life shattered in many devastating ways. But there’s a light inside of Charlie that has kept burning through all of the tragedy he has experienced, and that light is hope. Somehow, someway Charlie has never let go of his hope. He understands that he can’t change his past. But he also knows that he doesn’t have to be a prisoner to it.

Many of us consider ourselves to be the nicest people on earth. And yet, we too have experienced many terrible things in our lives. Like Charlie, we had all sorts of abuse spewed on us when we were children. We were victimized by adults and we were often victimized by other children once we arrived at grade school and high school.

For many years, we may have wondered why all of these bad things happened to us. And we may have mistakenly believed that bad things shouldn’t happen to good people, like us. But they do. It’s a fact of life that no one escapes from: Bad things happen to everyone.

So we need to take a major lesson from Charlie. And that lesson is this: We can’t change our past. The past is gone and much of it was beyond our control. But we also don’t have to be lifetime victims of our past. We can choose to take control of our lives. We can choose to partner with a Higher Power and we can choose to get all of the help we need to turn our tragedies into triumphs. In other words, we can’t change our past, but we can choose where we go from there. The choice is ours and no one can stop us—except us. So let’s make that conscious choice today to be focused and to move forward with the clarity and self-love we need to transform our lives into great success stories.