Change

Once upon a time I believed I accepted change easily. 

We moved an average of once a year when I was a kid, so you got used to leaving and starting over. Got used to relationships that weren't meant to last longer than a school year and homes that had mustard yellow walls because you knew they weren't yours to fix. Princeton Street was the longest I'd ever lived in one place and attended one school until I was a teenager. Four years in one house (if you don't count the times Mom and the kids lived with other people for awhile). Five years in one school.

I don't remember crying when we left Princeton Street. I felt the overdue-ness of the situation in my core, as though we'd lived their too long encroaching on someone else's time to build memories and friends there. Perhaps I wasn't meant to be friends with Tracy and Ana after all. Perhaps I was just the filler until the real girl moved in who belonged in a home where families planted roots and stayed forever.

That wasn't my family. So they weren't my tears to shed.

After a short stint in government housing (I suppose the term is Section 8 now), we moved to Utah. Another place to start over. Another school to keep quiet and do my academic thing and wait for another move. Change was easy when you didn't get attached to anything. I tried really hard no to get attached.

Fast forward past the awkwardness of high school, the waiting to pick up and move, the resistance to friendships that eventually break and attachments that cause more heartache than joy, and I'm an adult. Almost 32. And suddenly change is hard.

Suddenly I realize I have really awesome friends that I don't want to leave. And I realize I have really awesome friends in places I've already left. I realize that the bullshit I've been telling myself about change and moving on and letting go of people does not come from truth, but fear. It comes from not wanting to hurt anymore, not wanting to break each time we leave. Not wanting to know if people care or are counting the days until we are gone.

Photo HERE

I look back over my life and see a little girl so hurt by the constant change and lack of real relationships that she's told herself she doesn't care. That change is good. That moving on is healthy. And that relationships aren't meant to last. One lie on top of another until piled so impossibly high that the heap of garbage tumbles and falls and buries her alive. When she finally climbs out of the mess she's created she sees truth for the first time. That really she doesn't like change. That change for her means loss and heartache and trying to find her way through the darkness once more. And she sees, to her everlasting joy, the other truth--that some friends never left. Friendship, she discovers, isn't about proximity, but about heart. And for reasons beyond her comprehension, some people have chosen to love her despite everything she is or how far she's moved.

This little girl is courageous. Too bad she isn't me.

For all my years and epiphanies and growth opportunities, I am still afraid. The anxiety rolls inside me like a boat on the ocean waves and I am sick. The world keeps moving regardless of how still I sit. And my understanding cannot keep pace with my thoughts--little particles of worry whizzing around my head like high-energy particles in the Large Hadron Collider.

*breathes deeply*

Logically, I know change can be good. Change fosters innovation, paradigm shifts, and can lead to greater fulfillment. Change is the basis of religion--the idea that we start as imperfect beings and change, ever improving towards god-like characteristics. Change shakes things up, makes life exciting, stretches our capabilities, and creates a better us. Change is adventure, fulfillment and life. When I write all those things I feel better, even though fear of the unknown still chews on my insides.

And I wish, for just one moment, that Fear felt full. That Doubt would take a vacation. And Overwhelming would go sky-diving without a parachute.

The worst part of all? Change may not even happen. All this worry and nothing may manifest. We'll go about our daily lives, living as we always have with no one the wiser (except that I blogged about it, lol). But the thought of not changing? Of missing a new adventure?

*puts away Indian Jones hat and whip*

That makes me the most sad of all.