The case for change.
What is it that makes people start over or move in a different direction? Do we leave it all behind out of desperation or courage? Is it both?
This question. This one question. I believe it says everything about our journey through life. Not unlike many twenty-five year olds, this year I was smacked upside the head with the bleak realization that getting older doesn’t equate to security or certainty. Looking back I consider my reaction to this fact as a scrambling attempt to find a point of reference for change. I started wading out into the unknown further and further, more curious rather than afraid of my recklessness. “I just didn’t want to be the same person anymore,” rang in my head and pushed me out the door.
Begin caveat
For anyone reading for the first time, this may be the point where you exhale frustration and carbon dioxide for another self-serving self-discovery story of a twenty something privileged white girl, but please hold your pointer finger still for a few more paragraphs before clicking away. Use it to conduct a tiny orchestra or scratch the ear of a cat. If you must, pick your nose, but don’t half-ass it.
End caveat
How ridiculous it is that at twenty-five I found myself grappling with the same plight as a teenager? Who am I? Why doesn’t anyone understand me? Why meeeeeeeee? Ugh. But there it was. The uphill battle to become a new person.
As a counselor, I remember having a client who was going through something similar, but at a younger age. She was an international student from Namibia and came to therapy to discuss her relationship with her mother. What we ended up finding was a lapse in her self-identity. Within a period of seven months she had left a person characterized as obedient daughter, studies before fun, and morally sound to a blood hungry American youth. She had a boyfriend, they had sex. She had friends, they smoked pot. She had her own plans, her mother fought against them. And while that was the marker for “something isn’t right” we found her difficulties were stemming from her own self-perception, not her mother’s. How do you change this much and still recognize yourself? This rapid pace transition had created a sort of time warp zone, where nothing and everything made sense. The worst part of it, she told me, was the fact that only she could decide what to make out of it. She explained to me how this was exponentially more difficult given the collectivist culture of her family, so it did not surprise me that she would miss multiple sessions before coming back to the self-analysis. How exhausting. Many times over she would verbalize regret at having changed at all. Yes, she was happier in a sense and felt she understood herself more, but this whole change thing was awful. I think we both wondered if it would be worth it in the end.
So why do it? Why start over? Why change? Let’s zoom out from the individual and look at how families, communities, and countries change. Does it ever just happen painlessly, quickly, or with ease? If so, then how, when, why? And what’s the point of sustainable change if we will only change again? These are the questions that I will spend the next year answering. I want to know about the science of change, the unexplainable changes, the big and small, the tough and easy ones, the before and after of it, and how it moves us all forward in our little boats on the river of life.
Now I’m thinking about Pocahontas and David Bowie’s “Changes” simultaneously.
five minutes later
This blog will serve as the meeting place for the interviews I conduct throughout my community of friends, family, and colleagues as well as with the people I have yet to meet. My hope is that we find something good through the sharing of stories and wisdom regarding this concept of change.
Until next time.