If you have been put in your place long enough, you begin to act like the place. —Randall Jarell—
Others can’t put us in our place all by themselves; we have to go there. Our cooperation is required for snubs and for blame or for glorification. If we don’t choose to accept the role another has found for us, we don’t have to play it.
Sometimes it’s difficult to accept the choices life offers us. It seems easier to go along with the roles that others assign. How many people do we know who seem to drift through important areas of their lives, neither fully cooperating nor asserting their own choices? They might not like to admit it, but in “going along,” they’ve accepted someone else’s definition of who they are.
Some of us comply out of the desire to cooperate—but there is a big difference. Compliance means refusing to exercise our own power to choose; cooperation means using our power together with others to achieve more than any of us can alone. If we accept the responsibility for our lives, we forego the luxury of saying, “Look what you made me do”; but in exchange we may get to do what we want.
I will remember that anything that happens between us is half mine and half yours.