When Change is Just Change

I have changed a lot in my life. I hate change, probably more than most other people. I fight against it tooth and nail. I kick and scream and try to run back. I spend a lot of time wishing I could go back, back to my early twenties, back to my marriage, back to the years when I was more certain of God, of what was right, and of myself most of all. And yet, I am also someone who throws herself into new paths, into new dreams and new possibilities.

This is a strange contradiction and one I am still trying to understand fully. I push myself forward. I demand that I adapt. Maybe I’m not a perfectionist quite, but I might be worse, because I demand that I perform always at an extremely high level in not just a few areas, but every single thing that I touch. Hobbies become jobs. Interests become passions. Goals become obsessions. I rarely let go of things, so there are always more balls in the air. It’s hard to get off the hamster wheel of my own ambition. I need more and more success to feel that old hit of pleasure.

None of this means that I am deluded about my flaws, however. I tend toward dilettantism and I suspect this is part neurodiversity and part adult child prodigy/gifted child complex. If I find something I am interested in, I continue to be interested in it. I find that the more I study something, the more fascinating it is. When I fall down rabbit holes, I fall hard and I fall deeply. Arguably, I never stop falling. I just occasionally start pulling other rabbit holes into this one, so I can fall down multiple holes at the same time.

Too many metaphors, I know. But that’s the way it is inside my brain. Messy, lots of light bulbs going off all at once, and me trying to put them all together.

There are many things that I like about myself as a woman in her fifties. I find I am more patient than I ever managed to be in my earlier years. I am more kind and more empathetic. I am less scared of failure, which is a huge step forward for my inner growth. I am more fearless than I was and more unflinchingly honest, not just in my assessment of the world and other people in it, but of my own writing, my own behavior, my flaws and virtues. When I first started writing, my old writing group used to say that I was amazing at learning and processing feedback, that I always came back a huge step up in my skills and ability to communicate. I think that has always been true of me. I listen. I pay attention. I throw things away easily and I am willing to completely start over from scratch.

But these traits are not always good things. I have become aware that my tendency to start over again is also a flaw. Almost everything, as it turns out, has this two-sidedness to it. It can be wonderful and it can be terrible. It can produce the results I want and it can also produce disasters I will be apologizing for the rest of my life. Maybe the truth is that the more you do, the bigger you are, the more power you have to also harm, and there’s no way to get around the truth that it’s always a double-edged sword.

I miss things about my younger self. She was capable of things that I no longer am. She could read so damned fast. And she wasn’t just speeding through it. She could process those words and make sense of them. I am often the beneficiary of the information that she synthesized already and that is waiting for me. But just as often, I remember that I used to know something that I don’t anymore. I am constantly aware of how much less adept and brilliant I am now compared to how I used to be. Yes, the younger version of me had blind spots that I can see now and I wouldn’t want to go back. Except when I do desperately very much wish I could go back because it was easier to be brilliant and unaware of the whole world around me. Truly.

I have changed in many ways that I am proud of, and in a number of ways I am not. I trust less easily now. I might argue that it is, in fact, impossible for me to trust anymore. I am always watchful, always taking note of possible lies and exaggerations. I don’t expect as much of people. I know they are full of their own wounds and weaknesses and I can love them, but I also cannot always bear them around me. I am on guard always for something that will cause me to feel suicidal again and I avoid those things. Sometimes I wonder if this makes me a coward.

This is because change isn’t always progress. Sometimes change is just survival. I don’t know that I am a better person now than I used to be. I am a different person, yes. I am the person who survived the traumas that came to me. If you value survival, which I frankly do not always, then this person is the one who is better. But there are cracks. The strength that I present to the world at times is also fragile. The wounds that seem healed are always still there, more likely to break again. I trust myself less, along with everyone else. And for good reason. I am breakable. I have broken before. I rebuilt myself, but it’s not the same.

I am a writer and I suppose that my writing is better now because I have experienced more deeply painful things. I can write with more depth and less superficial glossing because the world is always full of cracks now. But the kinds of stories I write now aren’t the kind of stories I would have loved to read back then. I’m not at all convinced they are better writing. They are older and more mature, yes. But less—brilliant, less quick, less whatever it is that fell off me when I had to become what I am now.