There’s a saying that “the choice is yours,” but is it really? This simple phrase, often used as a symbol of empowerment or encouragement, carries a weight that most people don’t fully understand until they’re faced with seemingly impossible decisions. Every choice has a consequence, and when we are trying to decide, we aren’t thinking about what will happen three months or three years from now. We’re thinking about survival, about protection, about doing what feels right in that singular, intense moment.
In my situation, three years ago, I didn’t think that I would have been lying in a prison bed or that I would have been referred to as “inmate.” The word sits heavy on your tongue when you first hear it applied to yourself. It strips away layers of identity you’ve built over years, reducing you to a number, a case file, a cautionary tale. But the path that led me here wasn’t paved with malicious intent or calculated evil—it was built on split-second decisions made when everything was falling apart.
The Impossibility of Perfect Choices
Sometimes, when we’re in the heat of the moment, we’re torn between trying to do what’s right and what’s wrong, but what really is right and what really is bad? These aren’t philosophical questions when you’re living them they’re desperate calculations made with incomplete information and adrenaline coursing through your veins.
Consider this scenario: if you’re trying to defend yourself from a sexual assault or someone trying to beat you, and you end up using force not to harm the person but to try to get away from the danger you’re in, is that wrong? Most reasonable people would say no, not. Self-defense is a fundamental human right, an instinct as old as humanity itself. However, here’s where the cruel irony of our justice system becomes apparent.
If you had no other choice but to use excessive force to save your own life, and now the attacker is injured, in some states, you are now the attacker, and the attacker is now the victim. Let that sink in for a moment. The person who threatened your life, who put you in a position where you had to choose between their well-being and your survival, becomes the victim in the eyes of the law. Meanwhile, you—the person who was just trying to live become the criminal.
It’s a twisted reversal that happens more often than people realize. The law, in its attempt to be
objective, usually fails to account for the complex and messy reality of human desperation. It reduces complex situations to simple categories: victim and perpetrator, right and wrong, legal and illegal. But life doesn’t fit neatly into these boxes.
A Story of Impossible Choices
I know someone whose story illustrates this cruel irony perfectly. I have a bunkie—a cellmate—whose life changed forever because she made what she believed was the only choice available to her. In the heat of an argument, she thought the only option was standing up for herself and protecting her kids, especially her unborn baby, from harm’s way.
This wasn’t her first ordeal with violence. There had been other beatings, other moments where she’d absorbed the blows to protect her children. She had already lost one unborn child to violence, and the prospect of it happening again—or worse, losing her own life and leaving her son orphaned—drove her to act.
For her, the right thing was to defend her children more than herself. She wasn’t trying to harm her attacker; she was trying to create an escape route for herself and her babies. But intention and outcome don’t always align. While she wasn’t thinking that at the time, she was capable of hurting someone to the extent that it did; the situation escalated beyond what anyone could have predicted.
The ending was tragic. Now she is paying the consequences by being in prison, labeled as a criminal despite acting out of maternal instinct and desperation. However, what strikes me most about her story is that she appears to show great remorse for her actions and has made peace with herself and with God. She understands the weight of what happened, the pain her actions caused, even as she maintains that her motivation was pure.
She knows that maybe her actions were wrong in the eyes of the law, but the reason—to protect not just herself, but her son and unborn daughter—will never be bad or a regret. This distinction matters more than most people realize. Accepting legal responsibility does not necessarily mean accepting moral culpability when the two diverge so dramatically.
The Moral Complexity of Survival
This is where the phrase “the choice is yours” becomes particularly cruel. What choice did she really have? Watch her children suffer or potentially die? Allow herself to be killed, leaving her son without a mother? These aren’t choices in any meaningful sense—they’re impossible situations that force people into corners where all options lead to tragedy.
The system wants us to believe that there’s always a “right” choice, always a path that leads to justice and safety. Call the police, people say. Use the legal system. Seek help from social services. But what happens when those systems have failed you before? What happens when help is too far away and danger is immediate? What happens when you’ve tried everything else and still find yourself in a life-or-death situation?
So, yes, choices have their consequences, but what is more important is your moral understanding of what is right or wrong at the time you make your decision. This isn’t moral relativism or an excuse for violence—it’s an acknowledgment that human beings are complex creatures forced to navigate impossible situations with imperfect information and overwhelming emotions.
The Burden of Hindsight
Prison gives you a lot of time to think, perhaps too much time. You replay scenarios endlessly, wondering if you could have done something differently, if there was another path you didn’t see in that critical moment. The burden of hindsight is that it makes everything seem more straightforward than it was when you were living it.
From the outside, it’s easy to judge. It’s easy to say what someone should have done when you’re not the one facing down violence, when your children aren’t in danger, when your life isn’t on the line. But judgments from the outside don’t account for the full context of desperation, fear, and limited options that define these moments.
The truth is, you might not be able to control the consequences of your actions, especially when you’re forced to make split-second decisions under extreme duress. The consequences can spiral far beyond what anyone could reasonably predict. A moment of self-defense can become a lifetime of incarceration. A protective instinct can become a legal liability.
Learning from the Fire
However, there is wisdom to be gleaned from these experiences, painful as they may be. Always try not to make decisions in the heat of the moment because sometimes, when you calm down and rethink what happened, it might be too late to go back. This isn’t about victim-blaming or suggesting that people in crisis should somehow think more clearly—it’s about recognizing that intense emotions can cloud our judgment and lead us down paths we never intended to walk.
The challenge is that often, we don’t have the luxury of calm deliberation. Domestic violence doesn’t wait for you to schedule a thoughtful response. Sexual assault doesn’t pause for you to weigh your options carefully. Life threatening situations demand immediate action, and sometimes that action has consequences that reverberate for years to come.
Accepting What Cannot Be Changed
When those consequences come—when the legal system renders its verdict, when the prison doors close, when the label of “criminal” becomes part of your identity—you have no choice but to accept them and adjust. This acceptance isn’t about admitting guilt or shame; it’s about recognizing the reality of your situation and finding a way to move forward with dignity intact.
My bunkie has done this. She’s found peace with God and with herself, even while serving time for actions she took to protect her children. She carries the weight of the consequences while maintaining the rightness of her intentions. It’s a delicate balance to hold both accountability and self-compassion in the same space.
Redefining Choice and Consequence
Perhaps the real tragedy isn’t that choices have consequences—it’s that our society often fails to distinguish between choices made out of malice and those made out of desperation. We treat the person who attacks for gain the same way we treat the person who fights back for survival. We apply the same legal standards to premeditated violence and split-second self-defense.
This isn’t to say that consequences shouldn’t exist or that actions don’t matter. They do. Lives are changed, families are broken, and communities are affected by violence regardless of the motivation behind it. However, understanding the context of these choices and recognizing the impossible positions people are sometimes placed in could lead to more just outcomes and more compassionate responses.
Moving Forward
The phrase “the choice is yours” will always ring hollow for those of us who’ve learned that sometimes there are no good choices, only necessary ones. We understand that life is more complex than simple moral platitudes suggest, and that survival sometimes requires actions that haunt you forever, even when they were the only options available.
However, there’s also power in owning whatever agency we do have, even in the most challenging circumstances. We can choose how we respond to consequences. We can choose whether to learn and grow from our experiences or be consumed by them. We can find meaning in our suffering and help others avoid similar paths.
The choice—what little of it remains—is indeed ours. And that might be the most crucial choice of all.
This piece reflects personal experiences and observations from within the correctional system. Names and specific details have been altered to protect privacy, but the emotional truth remains unchanged.