Reading Recommendation: The Choice
- susanneschiffauer
- 25. Juli
- 4 Min. Lesezeit
Aktualisiert: 19. Okt.
What Story Do You Tell Yourself?
Some books you finish and move on. Others stay with you, quietly echoing in your head.The Choice by Dr. Edith Eger is one of those books.
Eger shares her remarkable life story: from surviving Auschwitz at sixteen to building a new life in the United States, raising a family, and only in her fifties (!) starting a new career as a clinical psychologist. She writes openly about loss, silence, perfectionism, and the long journey toward self-trust.
Her message is both personal and universal: while we cannot undo the past, we can choose what we do with it. It´s a story about freedom. And about responsibility. Above all, it’s about choice.
“I’ll be forever changed by her story… The Choice is a reminder of what courage looks like in the worst of times and that we all have the ability to pay attention to what we’ve lost, or to pay attention to what we still have.” (Oprah Winfrey)
Her book is more than a memoir. It’s a lifeline.
"The Choice" is a powerful story of a Holocaust survivor and her family. It is a tale about one of the strongest women to have walked this earth, a story about new beginnings. Most of all, it is about the radical power of choosing. Not what happens to us, but how we live with it. Her mother shared this wisdom with her, when they were deported to Auschwitz:
We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.
We can’t control what life throws at us. But we can influence how we respond, how we think about it, and which story we choose to carry forward.
It would be easy to admire Eger’s strength and stop there. But what stayed with me was something else: her honesty about how complicated it is to survive. How long it can take to find your footing again. And how easily we fall into patterns that once protected us but now keep us stuck.
Perfectionism is the belief that something is broken: you.
Eger speaks openly about her own need to please, to prove herself, to perform. Not out of ambition, but out of fear. It was her way of coping. For a long time, she believed that achievement would fix the pain. It didn’t. What helped was learning to accept herself.
That’s something I think many of us can relate to, even without having lived through anything remotely similar.
The Habit of Beliefs
We all carry quiet rules and old beliefs about ourselves. We repeat them until they feel like facts. But often they’re just habits of thought. And once we notice them, we can begin to question them. There´s more:
To change our behavior, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.
One of the central ideas in The Choice is that the only moment we really have any control over is the one we’re in right now. We spend a lot of time thinking about the past. Or we wait for the future. For something to change. But real change starts here. Eger says:
The only place where we can exercise our freedom of choice is in the present.
That doesn’t mean forgetting the past. Eger never does that. But she shows that we don’t have to live in it. We can take it seriously without letting it take over. We can look at what hurt us and still decide what kind of person we want to be going forward.
From Blame to Responsibility
Eger is very clear about one thing: you can’t change what happened to you, and you don’t have to excuse anyone for it. But you do have a choice in how you live with it now.
You can live in the prison of the past, or you can let the past be the springboard that helps you reach the life you want now.
Being responsible for yourself doesn’t mean ignoring the facts. It just means you’re no longer waiting for someone else to make things right. You’re taking ownership of your direction.
The Power of your own Story
And here’s where it comes back to the stories we tell ourselves. Because they do shape how we feel and how we act.
Are we a victim, or a survivor? The person who’s always a little too late, a little too much, a little not enough? Or do we choose to see ourselves differently?
We don’t need to rewrite the past to move forward. We just need to stop letting it write our present. That’s where the real choice lies. Not in what happened then, but in what happens next.
I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment.
A quiet Reminder
The Choice isn’t loud. Nor does it give you easy answers. But it offers something better: a reminder that no matter what you’ve been through, there’s still something to choose. Every day. With strength and honesty. And with the possibility of a different outcome.
“The story you tell yourself is the one you live.”
So choose with care. And if you’ve been telling yourself the same story for years, do take the time to pause for a moment. You might just find a new one waiting.
Travel light. Speak true. The story you tell yourself is the one you live. And wherever you're going, take language that serves you well. The choice is yours.
Photos: Jon Tyson and Glen Carry via Unsplash
Photo: Letizia Bordonie via Unsplash
We don’t know where we’re going, we don’t know what’s going to happen, but no one can take away from you what you put in your own mind.
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