The responsibility we forget

I know we all carry moral, emotional, physical and every other kind of responsibility and need — for the relationships and the promises we build across a life. I have done my best by all of them, as far as I could.

But I do not think we are born merely to fulfil responsibilities of every sort while forgetting the one we owe to our own self. Those obligations are themselves built up through the journey, and through whatever framework we happen to live inside. Which of them comes first is a choice, and it is worth making that choice against how much time a single life actually holds.

Throughout my life I have only done what I felt was right. It never arrived gently — it came after a breaking point, somewhere in childhood or in my teens. But that break is what let me step out of the obligations, and it showed me they were never as binding, or as hard, as they had looked.