The Choice by Edith Eger is a wonderful, staggering often harrowing tale of one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz. She was pulled from a pile of bodies when the camp was liberated, eventually ended up in America, and became a clincial physchologist.A truly staggering moment she says when the camp was liberated, came when some wanted to go back inside, even though it was obviously felt like hell on earth.
She reasoned through her later studies that these people found “safety” inside, and were too scared to face a new reality on the outside, even if it was freedom they really craved.Not comparing the extremes here at all, but these situations can play out in daily life and have done is history. Some people like their life in prison somehow, for the “safety” and routine it gives them. Some like living with people they shouldn’t, however bad this may seem, because their situation seems somehow “safer”.
Some people i speak to feel unable to leave the perceived “safety” of staying at home for the last two years of covid, and that staying at home makes them feel better and “safe”, and when opportunities come to go outside, they often turn them down despite their mental health often deteorating without them even noticing.When the opportunity comes to meet people even outside, they turn them down due to feeling greater anxiety, and some have come to a point when they cannot face people anymore, as the “safety” they feel at home on their own outweighs any obvious social and mental health benefit of seeing people., and the longer they stay indoors, the more unable they seem to come out of the house.
Edith Eger, the inspirational survivor who has given inspirational talks to many audiences encourages us to make different choices. To leave the past behind, because if we don’t, it will still own us, will confine us and keep us in a prison of our own making.At the end of each speech, Edith does a karate kick in the air, saying “Remember no one can take away from you what you put here in your mind”, urging us to live, whatever your situation, with freedom and to celebrate the opportunities we now have, and at 93 now, she urges everyone to not live like a prisoner of their own minds.
