“What defines you?” is still a question left without an answer. We are so fixated on other people’s lives that we lose focus on finding a way to define our lives. How people react to you depends mostly on what you give out to them. But the question still remains, what defines you?

There was once a lady who was doing her matric in 2015, she had had a difficult situation regarding her background. She had only one T-shirt, one skirt and one pair of shoes. Her school mates made fun of her and judged her because she couldn’t afford anything and sometimes she would go to school on an empty stomach.

During the matric dance she had nothing to wear and she just pitched up dressed with her school uniform and people made fun of her.

I suppose it was a painful experience.

But one day she decided to make a choice of whether to feel pity and play the victim game or to strive to work hard and change her family’s circumstance. She then chose to work hard to change her family’s circumstance and today she’s doing her third year in varsity.

With everything that you’ve encountered, what defines you? Are you defined by your background, past, mistakes, people’s perceptions about you, failures, criticism or your fake clothes?

We should understand that all of those things are inevitable and we are bound to stumble upon them. We seem to forget that nobody’s perfect. We all make mistakes. We fail. We’ve got our own flaws and imperfections. As human beings we are all wired to make choices – life’s greatest ticket.

Wayne Dyer once said: “With everything that has happened to you, you can either feel sorry for yourself or treat that as a gift. Everything is either an opportunity to grow or an obstacle to stop you from growing.”

We need to be aware of the choices we make because we are indeed defined by them. The choices we should make should be of improving, changing, rejuvenating our goals, believing in ourselves, and following our intuitions. We must keep moving. We shouldn’t play the victim of circumstance, be egocentric, refuse to change, throw a pity party for ourselves and not rectify our mistakes. We need to understand that we are not defined by what happened to us but we are defined by the choices we take after what happened to us.

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