I recently watched Wicked: For Good, and it sent me down a Wizard of Oz rabbit hole. I watched the first Wicked movie, Oz the Great and Powerful (the Sam Raimi/James Franco one), and then finally the original Wizard of Oz movie.

Well, when I say “original,” I suppose I mean the most popular Wizard of Oz movie. There were two others before that (both silent films), and I even watched the earliest one. It was eerie and strange, but it’s worth a watch if you’re a cinephile like me.

I’m not sure when I became so obsessed with the Wizard of Oz. I just remember thinking the classic film was incredibly compelling when I was a kid. I think it’s the notion of another world or universe existing beneath ours that fascinates me, a dreamworld of sorts, where fantastical things are possible and filled with compelling characters.

What I find most interesting is how the movie works on two levels. The first level is pure entertainment, of course. But the second is psychological. The three companions Dorothy meets along the Yellow Brick Road represent archetypes of the very qualities she needed to find within herself in order to understand that there truly was no place like home.

The Scarecrow—an old Jungian archetype of fear—represents the mind. The Tin Man represents the heart. The Lion represents courage. It wasn’t enough for Dorothy to know she needed to get home from just one of those perspectives. She had to see it through all three lenses before realizing she always had the power to return home herself.

What the original movie and the newer Wicked films share, though, is the theme of choice. We are where we are right now because, on some level, we choose to be here. If you’re unhappy, it may be difficult to accept that you’re choosing that unhappiness, but it’s an essential realization if you ever want to choose something else.

Several years ago, when I was going down the rabbit hole of my own psyche and trying to work through my issues, I stumbled across this idea. It was a pretty popular concept in self-help circles at the time: the notion of 100% responsibility. That, at any given moment, you are 100% responsible for the life you’re living.

If your first instinct is to scoff at that, let me point something out: the idea of 100% responsibility often makes people balk because they interpret it as blame. You hear “you are 100% responsible for your life,” and your brain processes it as “you are 100% to blame for everything that has ever happened to you.”

Responsibility and blame are two separate ideas. Let me use an example from my own life to illustrate how they are different.

Around the time I was discovering this idea, I was still a pack-a-day smoker. Whenever I was home, I would often go out on my porch to smoke because I didn’t want the smell getting into everything I owned.

One day I went outside, sat on my porch, and noticed someone had thrown trash into my yard. I was annoyed, naturally. But I also tried to view it through the lens of responsibility. How was I responsible for trash that I had nothing to do with?

Again, I was confusing responsibility with blame.

Then it clicked. I am not to blame for the trash in my yard, but I am now responsible for dealing with it. It’s not my fault that some asshole threw their trash onto my property, and I have every right to be angry about it. But it doesn’t serve me to let that anger run my life.

From the perspective of responsibility, I had three options:

1. Do nothing. After all, it’s not my fault the trash is in my yard, so why should I have to clean it up? We often have this attitude about things that aren’t our fault. We can’t control what other people do, and it doesn’t feel fair to clean up their mess.
2. Track down the person who did it and make them clean it up (or get the cops involved). That would be the most “fair” solution. But realistically? Nearly impossible—and even if possible, it would take forever.
3. Clean it up myself. The least fair option, but the one that leads to the quickest resolution. Basically: suck it up and move on.

In the same way that I became responsible for that trash (despite not causing it), we are often responsible for dealing with what ends up in front of us, even when it’s not fair.

This is easy to grasp when the problem is a piece of trash in your yard. It gets much harder when we talk about the ways people have hurt us. It can sound callous to tell someone who was abused as a child that they are responsible for the burden they now carry. And it is callous if you’re still thinking in terms of blame.

This isn’t “blame the victim.” It’s about the most effective way to resolve our inner turmoil. You may not be to blame for what happened to you, but it has become your responsibility to decide what to do with the pain you carry.

And the same three choices apply. Sometimes the wisest thing is to do nothing. Sometimes it’s worth the fight to hold others accountable for their trash. And other times, it’s more useful and freeing to simply clean it up yourself and move forward.

The key is awareness of the choice. That is your true power. You can choose the path that’s most effective for taking responsibility for the things you’ve faced.

This is the life you’ve chosen. And, like Dorothy, you’ve always had the power to go home. You just had to realize it for yourself.