There is a mobile home community about forty-five minutes from where I live. Two bedrooms, one bathroom, and sometimes ten people inside it. I go there for work — I coordinate a mobile home repair program for a county here in Northern Virginia — and every time I leave, I carry something back with me that has nothing to do with repair schedules or inspection checklists.
I don’t know if the people I meet there have made peace with their lives or simply adjusted their expectations until the two became indistinguishable.
I don’t know if that’s even a distinction that matters.
What I do know is that some of what they’re living was never a choice — not the income, not the housing stock they were born into, not the systems that decided, long before they had a say, what their options would look like.
And some of it is choice — what they do with the little room they have, how they show up for each other inside those two bedrooms, whether they lean toward bitterness or toward tenderness.
It’s the same thing I see when I turn the mirror on myself.
I am a petite, curly-haired, brown woman whose entire lineage traces back to Central America — and to the Spaniards who colonized it.
I didn’t choose that inheritance. I didn’t choose to be born on this continent with no true, unbroken thread back to the land my ancestors are from. I don’t choose it now, either, every time I introduce myself, every time I say my own name and watch someone’s mouth fumble around it. That reckoning is not optional. It’s just there, every day, whether I want to do the work of it or not.
I didn’t choose to be organized, or empathetic, or relentlessly intentional.
Those aren’t personality quirks I selected off a shelf — they’re just how I came wired. I didn’t choose to have a job since I was sixteen years old, always working, always tethered to some version of “the job that pays the bills.”
I don’t even like calling it full-time, honestly — that’s corporate language, late-stage-capitalism language, and it was never true anyway, because my time has never belonged to one thing. It’s always been divided — between the job, the business, the writing, the wondering. But the fact that I devote real energy to that “stable job” doesn’t mean I authored the need for it.
I didn’t choose the economy I was born into any more than the people in that mobile home community chose theirs.
So where does choice even live, if it’s not in any of that?
I think this is where a lot of spiritual and self-help language quietly lies to us.
Manifesting. Just try harder. If you believe it, you can build it. Somewhere in there is a moral judgment dressed up as encouragement — the idea that if your life doesn’t look a certain way, you simply didn’t want it enough, didn’t align enough, didn’t work hard enough.
And I understand the appeal of that story, because it hands us control in a world that mostly doesn’t give us any. But it’s a fallacy.
Sometimes it really isn’t in the cards. Sometimes trying harder doesn’t matter, because the deck was shuffled before you sat down at the table. I see this daily in the people I serve, and if I’m honest, I see it in myself, too — in the ways my life hasn’t moved just because I wanted it to.
Here’s the part that some spiritual frameworks would push back on: they’d say that before we ever entered these bodies, we chose this — chose the family, the skin, the circumstances, the whole unfolding, as some kind of pre-agreed curriculum for the soul.
That’s a belief, and a beautiful one, and I’m not here to argue it away. But it’s a separate conversation from the one I’m having about what’s in front of us now, in these bodies, in this lifetime, with no memory of any of that choosing.
So let me say the other thing plainly: I don’t think life asks us to choose at all.
I think life is simply life — an experiment, not a mandate.
Nothing about existence, as far as anything I’ve witnessed or lived or been told, requires that we produce something, prove something, or arrive somewhere. Life doesn’t guarantee success.
It doesn’t even guarantee that you keep living. The point was never the outcome. The point is the experiment itself — what gets derived, created, abandoned, revised, lived out loud or lived quietly. That’s it. That’s the whole assignment.
And this is where the paradox does its double duty, and I think it’s the truest thing in this whole essay: nothing is a choice, and also, nothing has to be.
We don’t choose to be born a man or a woman, queer or not, into this family or that dogma, with this privilege or without it. None of that is chosen. But we also aren’t required to make a choice about any of it, because life was never handing us a decision tree to begin with — it was handing us a life.
Not choosing is itself a kind of living. The demand to choose, to optimize, to author every inch of ourselves — that pressure is one we invented, not one life handed us.
There’s an old kind of story — two brothers, same house, same father, same addiction sitting at the family table. One becomes an addict himself. One doesn’t. Neither of them chose the inheritance. The father, the wiring, the household — none of that was on the table for negotiation. But what each brother did with it — that’s where authorship actually starts. Not in the getting, but in the handling.
That’s true of the woman who can carry a child and the woman who can’t. It’s true of the person born queer, which was never a decision, and what they do with that truth — lean into it, hide from it, war with it, celebrate it — which is.
It’s true of me, showing up every day to a job that isn’t really “full-time” in any way that matters to me, doing something with a set of skills I didn’t choose to have, inside an economy I didn’t choose to be born into. And it’s true of the people in that mobile home, forty-five minutes and a whole world away from me, who didn’t choose their inheritance either, and who are, in their own way, choosing what to do with it every single day, same as I am.
I don’t think we ever fully answer this. I don’t think we’re supposed to.
I think the only real effort available to us — if life demands any effort at all — is to recognize what we’ve been given, admit it honestly, accept it without needing it to be different, and then play with it, model it, revere it. Not to arrive. Not to win.
Just to know ourselves, all the way down to the unchosen parts, and in knowing ourselves, maybe get a little closer to knowing each other.
That’s the most any of us gets to do. I think that might be the whole point.
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