Good choice...bad choice?

I may make good choices...but I am awful at taking photos!

I make a lot of life choices which cause people around me to raise their eyebrows, to make doubtful "hmm" and "ohh" noises and look completely confused by.  Im sure I drive my long suffering mother mad, but I am endlessly grateful she appreciates my crazily independent streak and trusts me sufficiently to allow me to make my own choices regardless of her opinion (or at least knows me well enough to keep quiet!)

In the last 5 years, I have made the following choices which, at face value, even to me, look like "bad" choices...

1. I chose to drop out of university 3 days before I was due to start my course.
2. I chose to apply for jobs that I am completely unqualified to do without any relevant experience.
3. I chose to spend a summer working with kids 14h a day...and I dont really like children!
4. I chose to stay with a boyfriend who cheated on me.
5. I chose my Master Plan despite the fact it will drain my bank account, waste my hard-earned degree and close a lot of doors in my future working and family lives.

And yet, when I made these choices, I knew they were absolutely the right choice, the best choice, for me.  I'm not one to make choices without considering all my options first, but I also do listen to my initial gut feeling.   And today, I am glad that I trust myself, glad that I trust God's plan for my life, because I maintain that these were "good" choices.

1. If I had gone to a traditional university at that point in my life, I would not have been forced to analyse my life, my goals and my motivations.  I think it would have taken me years of doing jobs that didnt satisfy before I stepped back for long enough to consider these things and direct myself in the direction of happiness.
2. Not only did I apply for those jobs...I got one of them!  My job as a Software Tester at Penrillian has financed my future travel plans, if I hadnt aimed so high I would never ever have been able to save this much money.
3. Camp Sonshine was the best experience of my life!!!
4. Yes this relationship did eventually fail, but it was an invaluable learning experience.  I have so many great memories and I do not regret any one moment of heartache because of the value of what I gained.
5. Technically I dont know whether this was the right choice yet (as I havent left yet)...but I have SO much faith that it will be beyond my wildest and most exciting dreams!

So the next time someone tells you that you are making a "bad" choice, stop and take a moment.  If I had listened to the opinions of those around me, to the preachings of my culture, I quite possibly wouldnt have made any of those five choices.  And I would have been a worse person, a more dissatisfied and disconnected person and a far more lost person because of it.

In fact, my greatest is the one major choice I made which was based more on what I percieved to be culturally and morally the "good" choice rather than trusting my own opinion on the best option.  I let someone go who I should have clung to as if my very life depended on it.   That loss will forever scar me.  But wrapped up with trusting my ability to make good choices, is the concept of trusting myself to make the best out of my choices whether they are good or bad.  We all make mistakes, its how we live with them that differentiates us.

This world often pushes us towards conformity instead of what is best for us.  It is you who has to live with the consequences of your choices, trust that the ability to make good choices lies within you.