Daily Prompt’s QOTD

There are parts of my life that feel inevitable. Not poetic. Not mystical. Just inevitable…

I didn’t ask for heart disease.

I didn’t choose an ICD.

I didn’t choose ablations, cardioversions or operating rooms

I didn’t choose a colectomy and the months it took to recover.

I didn’t choose Lupron injections and PSA tests after my prostate cancer treatment failed.

Those weren’t forks in the road where I was allowed to weigh options.

Those are the realities that arrived uninvited.

Certain chapters feel written…

Not by the stars or some cosmic force.

But by biology.

By circumstance.

By the fragile architecture of the human body that sometimes requires intervention to keep going.

Yet other parts of my life…

They don’t feel inevitable at all.

Love didn’t feel inevitable.

Staying didn’t.

Writing didn’t.

Choosing to speak openly about illness and lost love instead of shrinking into it, wasn’t fate.

That was a decision.

That was me.

I don’t get to edit my diagnosis…

I don’t get to revise the pathology report.

But I do get to decide whether I stay who I am in the eyes of others.

I get to decide that my PSA does not define me.

I get to decide that loss becomes depth and a source of love instead of bitterness and hate.

I don’t see fate as a script with every line already written.

Maybe I believe in ownership after the fact.

Life handed me certain chapters…

Some feel unavoidable.

Some feel like timing.

Some feel like mistakes.

Once they happen…

They become part of my story and that story matters.

If there is destiny…

Maybe it isn’t about what happens to me.

Maybe it’s about who I choose to be.

Because it all happened to me.

So, you tell me, do I believe in fate or destiny?

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