I make mistakes every damn day.
That's the opening line of the song. Not an affirmation. Not a declaration of strength. A confession.
I wrote it that way deliberately.
Because I had no interest in writing another piece of content that tells people what they should do before earning the right to say it. The only way I could write a song about choosing change was to admit first that I have needed to. Repeatedly. And not always gracefully.
I've fallen hard. Hit bottom. Tasted dirt.
I'm not going to dress that up or assign it a chapter title. Most people reading this have their own version of that sentence. You don't need mine.What I will tell you is what I did with it.
I owned it.
Not immediately. Not perfectly. But eventually, and then consistently, I stopped looking for somewhere else to put the weight of my own bad decisions. I stopped negotiating with the mirror. I stopped waiting for circumstances to change before I was willing to.
That decision became a song.
Choose Change was written because I kept seeing the same pattern.
Men in managed decline, their health eroding, their energy disappearing, their bodies softening, their purpose quietly leaving the building. And when you asked them about it, the answer was always external.
My genes. My thyroid. My schedule. My age. My circumstances. I understood the impulse. I had used versions of those answers myself. But at some point the answer stops being an explanation and starts being a choice. A choice to stay exactly where you are and call it something else.
That's what I was tired of.
Not the struggle. The struggle is universal.
Body, mind, money, soul. Pick your war.
Some days I win, some days I fall short.
But I don't hide, I don't run, I don't bend.
I own the loss and start again.
That's not poetry about someone else's life. That's Tuesday.
The difference isn't winning every day. Nobody wins every day. The difference is what you do with the loss. Whether you hide it, explain it, outsource it, or own it and begin again.
The redemption arc in this song is not dramatic. There is no cinematic moment where everything clicks. No single decision that rewrites the story overnight. There is only the accumulation of choices made in the direction of better.
One decision, one moment, one breath.
Can rewrite your story from failure to depth.
I believe that. Not because it sounds good. Because I have lived the slow version of it across decades. The daily decision to return. To own the miss. To begin again without ceremony and without an audience.
That is what choose change actually looks like in practice.
Not a transformation.
A direction.
The most important person you will ever meet is you.
Not the version of you that exists in your best moments. The version that shows up on the hard days, the tired days, the days when the easier path is right there and nobody would know the difference. That version of you is making decisions right now about who you are becoming. I wrote this song for him.
Not because I have it figured out. Because I know what it costs to not choose. I know what slow drift looks like from the inside. I know how quietly a man can disappear from his own life while everyone around him assumes he's fine.
I also know that the moment you decide to own it, something shifts. Not everything. Not immediately. But something. And that something is enough to begin.
Choose change.
Everything changes when you do.
Until next time, Bill
Amor Fati
Choose Change is available on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and all major streaming platforms.
