Think back to a time when someone spoke to you – read you a story, told you something from their own past – in a voice so comforting it felt like you were being swaddled in a blanket. For me, this was when I used to lay on our terrace, washed over by bright moonlight and the warm breeze of Indian summer nights, as my grandma told me stories from her life in her beautifully honeyed voice. I remember feeling completely safe. I wanted her to keep going, never stop.
I got the exact same feeling recently when I listened to the audiobook “The Choice: Embrace the possible”, written by Dr. Edith Eva Eger and read by Tovah Feldshuh. The book is a memoir spanning seven decades. We first learn the gut-wrenching story of the author’s childhood in Hungary just before World War II. We find her as an awkward and skinny Jewish girl who excels in gymnastics and loves doing Ballet. We follow her to the concentration camps in Auschwitz with her parents and her sister. In the camps, she loses her loved ones and survives only by staying anchored to the feeling of hope for a better day. “If I survive this day, tomorrow I will be free,” we hear the author saying to herself over and over and over, as she thwarts or bears the unspeakable cruelties inflicted on her and her fellow inmates.
The next part chronicles the shape her life takes after liberation. Even after being liberated from the Nazis, her tribulations do not end. She flees from her country, flees from communists, flees from her past. She begins to glue together the shards of her broken life slowly. She meets her husband, becomes a mother, moves to Austria, and then to the US. She is an immigrant struggling to learn the culture of her new country. We see her learning English, building a homelife, and finding her footing. She becomes inspired by another Holocaust survivor Dr. Victor Frankl, who becomes her mentor. She enrolls in college, becomes a psychologist, and begins helping people to liberate themselves from their own “mental concentration camps”.
Towards the end of the book, when she is eighty-plus years old, she travels to Berchtesgaden – the mountain retreat where Hitler and his Nazi officers planned the “the final solution” to exterminate Jewish people. She has been asked to give a lecture to hundreds of army cadets. She gets on stage and talks to them about forgiveness, about the lessons you learn from your experience, and the joy of being free and alive. Whether she is discussing her own emotions sleeping in the Berchtesgaden hotel where Joseph Goebbels had slept all those years ago, or her patient Emma who is wasting away from anorexia, there is a common thread that weaves through the book: Your mind can keep you imprisoned in a free world and, conversely, spring you free even if you are in a real prison.
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.
Survivors don't have time to ask, "Why me?" For survivors, the only relevant question is, "What now?
Taking risks doesn’t mean throwing ourselves blindly into danger. But it means embracing our fears so that we aren’t imprisoned by them.
Here you are! In the sacred present. I can’t heal you—or anyone—but I can celebrate your choice to dismantle the prison in your mind, brick by brick. You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now. My precious, you can choose to be free.
I was inspired by the author’s story, and I absorbed her wisdom like I’d from a therapist or from my own grandma. In these times of great suffering and stress globally, reading or listening to books like this takes you out of your own problems. It helps you face life with more zest and energy.
Most of what you and I go through likely pale in comparison with what Edith went through in concentration camps in Austria and Germany. But then again, trauma can take many forms, and the impact of COVID has been hard on many of us. Besides, as Dr. Eger says, there is no "hierarchy of suffering". You feel the thorns of your life as intensely and dramatically as she did living through the Holocaust. Her message to us is simple: you can be your own jailer, or you can be you own liberator. Choose what you want to be.
This is especially true when we are dealing with elaborate prisons we construct for ourselves - the many limitations our own Inner Self-Critic and the Society have constructed all around us: “I am not smart enough”, "I am not thin enough", “I am an impostor”, “They will never hire me at this company”, “I will never learn how to code, this is too hard for me”, “I can never communicate well. My English is just not good”, “A woman cannot do that”. Every single solid brick of our mental prisons carefully fired and shaped and placed one on top of another….
No matter what you’re dealing with, Dr. Eger's brilliant book argues, choose how you respond to what life is asking of you. Choose what you are putting into your head and what you surround yourself with. Are the books you are reading and the people you surround yourself with bringing you hope, clarity, inspiration, and confidence? Or are they bringing you down? Choose to silence your Inner Self Critic and challenge your cognitive distortions. Choose to dismantle your prisons, brick by brick.