Personal Responsibility is a blessing: Not a Burden

From my earliest memory, as a child, I felt the constant stress of being poor, as do all children and teenagers growing up in poverty. As the impoverished grow into adulthood, they settle for lives of quiet desperation. Sometimes that stress explodes in ways that bring painful consequences.
Over many years, I've watched dear friends and beloved family members, one by one, allow poverty to pull them under, allow the shame to diminish them when there is no reason for shame. I've seen them allow addiction to draw them away from any real solutions. As a boy, as soon as I was old enough to articulate it to myself, I was determined to not let that ever happen to me. I didn't.
One of the blessings of starting out with nothing is that practically every person, every situation, every encounter becomes your teacher. I consider myself very fortunate in this regard. I've been able to observe the behaviors of all social economic classes in our society and I've learned lessons.
There are many factors that contributed to my success—too many factors to outline in a single post. But my failures could always be linked to specific behaviors. One of the most important lessons I learned while working my way out of poverty is that personal responsibility is not a burden. It is a blessing. Taking personal responsibility was the only way I could change the future. And, that is the subject of this post.
Whenever I found myself in trouble or facing a crisis during those early years, it was my choice to decide how I would react. While I was not always responsible for all that happened to me, I was responsible for how I chose to think, feel and react when bad things happened. I was responsible for the choices I made, not some other person, not my circumstances, or my economic status. As it relates to reacting to my situation, the choice was mine alone to make. Throughout my childhood and adolescent years, the one thing I could cling to, the one thing that kept hope alive, was the knowledge that readiness for opportunity was my only way out. I didn't know how to make it happen, or whether it would happen, but I knew that the outcome was dependent upon the choices I made in life.
As is true with many poverty victims, I grew up in the constant presence of violence. For all my childhood years I was talking about it, engaged in it, or observing it, but violence was always present. At age eighteen, I had to make a choice. I could continue fighting, with all the negative outcomes, or I could choose to learn alternative coping skills. It was a difficult challenge for me, and it took many years, but I eventually learned how to cope without violence. I changed my choices and it changed my life.
As with most people, personal security was a major concern, a driving force for everything I did. I needed to know that my future would not resemble the past; in fact, the past terrified me. Planning for the future meant delaying gratification to an uncertain date. At the same time, I could see first-hand how taking immediate satisfaction was destroying the lives of others around me.
Making long term plans is a leap of faith for all of us. I had to have faith that I would live a long life, long enough to enjoy the fruits of my labor. All the while my focus was more upon fleeing from poverty rather than achieving success. Poverty absolutely scared me to death. As it turned out, taking personal responsibility, holding myself accountable, something that many of my friends and relatives refused to do, was the blessing that offered the escape route I so desperately sought.

About the author: Doug Wallace is an attorney, a successful entrepreneur and a published author. His book, Everything Will Be All Right is a memoir about growing up in generational poverty in the rural south. Doug chose to write his story of growing up in poverty as a way to call attention to the unimaginable hardships for children of the generationally impoverished. Available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Kindle, Sony Reader and fine book stores everywhere.