Easy

It's easier to hide. It's easier to think about how you could improve your life within the cocoon you make for yourself. Taking a chance is tricky. It proves you actually care about the result. Knowing it could go wrong, but pushing forward anyway. Staying within the safety of knowledge, the easy way to exist is stick to what you know, even if it makes you miserable.

You know you're better than this. You know you could fight the good fight and achieve everything that is within your power to be. But it's so hard, and the road is littered with traps and quicksand. You need to step lightly and decisively. You need to be sure. You need the belief that the fight will be over one day, and everything you've been though will make you a better person, a stronger person. One who can look back and be glad of the choices you have made, of walking the road leading to where you are now. Each step forward a small success, each step forward a step away from the past you don't want to hang on to.

But that damn road. Everlong, and with dead ends and crossroads. Why keep walking when you know this piece of pavement so well? You can't guarantee the journey will be worth it, so stop, take a breath, and stay put for three years. It doesn't matter, don't imagine too hard how things might have been. Stick to the misery you know. Don't look at the road.

It's so seductive to stay, but you start pushing yet again, face the road, face the truth of the journey, because you know you should, because you know you can crawl to every crossroad and be strong enough to pick your path.

Choices are a funny thing. You think that the battle is making the choice, but it isn't. It's making it happen. Too much red tape, too many people telling you no. Too many throwing your health in your face. Prove you can cope, they say. Prove you could make it work if we deign to grant you your choice. Tell us, in a big white box, why we should help, because right now we don't think you're worth it. But be warned, if you are too convincing, if you prove you think you're worth it, tell us, why do you need our help? There's a lot more people who don't have that self-worth. Try again when you're more needy, when you know your place.

So you don't rise above. That road you chose is covered in bricks now, with only your pitiful hands to push through. Hands that bleed. You can't climb, so you burrow. Deep and dark, in the shadow of the wall between you and your road. A dirt bed to exist in, to hide your shame as you see other people scale that wall so easily. You think about the ways you could win, but you don't climb out of that cocoon again. It's easier to hide.