People don't change

Except when they do, which is all the time

Dear Writer,

I am trying to learn to be disagreeable.

It’s super uncomfortable, and I’m very, very bad at it.

If you’ve followed me for any amount of time, I’m sure you’ve heard me speak of my extremely gaslighty childhood, in which don’t believe your lying eyes was the rule of the day. If at any time my mother decided the truth was getting in the way of her preferred narrative, she would just change it.

Like, for instance, let’s say the phone was ringing.

(This was back in the day when a phone had only one purpose and it was to be just a phone and it was attached to a wall in your house and when it rang, the entire house shook with the ferocity of Someone Wants to Talk to You and everyone would race to the phone to answer it before that Someone hung up and we never found out why they had called. It was kind of the social media of the day, if the only people who could tweet at you were people you personally knew and you had given a special code to and you actually wanted to hear from, and you could only read their tweets if you rushed to Twitter in the exact moment they tweeted.)

Anyway.

I’d be like, “Hey, the phone is ringing,” and my mother would be like, “No, it’s not,” and then I would listen to it ring and be like, Oh, wow, I guess maybe just my ears are ringing? and then the next time the phone rang, I would just sit there and my mother would be like, “Answer the phone. Can’t you hear it ringing?” and then I’d be like, “But… last time you said…” and she’d get up in a frustrated huff because why does she have to do everything around here?

Lather, rinse, repeat that shit and you end up with a person who is constantly looking to other people and being like, “The phone is ringing, right?” This hesitancy to trust my own judgment until confirmed by someone outside of myself set me up to be a super fun plaything for people who were of the mind to manipulate and control me…

…which is likely what led me straight into the gaping maw of a sociopath, but let’s just whistle past that shit.

Anyway.

As a result of this fuckwittery, I also have a huge people pleasing thing, because if ANYONE doesn’t like me then that means I’m a Bad Person because Other People are the Ultimate Arbiters of Truth and why, yes, that’s some warmed-over bullshit, but have you ever tried breaking a habit that was forged in the hell-spitting fires of Mount Trauma?

Oh. You have?

Sucks, don’t it?

Anyway, I heard someone say recently that people don’t change, and because of my knee-jerk belief that Other People are the Ultimate Arbiters of Truth, I was like, “Wow. Okay. I guess that sounds right,” until I thought for a minute and I was like, “Wait. But. No.”

The phone is ringing, right?

Because… people do change. People change all the time. As a matter of fact, the destabilization of absolutely fucking everything right now is happening because people change.

I’m not saying they always change for the better; I’m saying they change. And here’s how I can prove it.

With stories.

Have you ever wondered why we are so obsessed with stories? I mean stories, at their core, are just this thing happened, then that thing happened, and then this other thing happened and if they’re told well all of those events will be linked and building to something, but even if that’s the case and it’s a really good story, well… chicken parm is also really good, but we’re not all obsessed with chicken parm, so why are we all so obsessed with stories?

I’ll tell you why; meaning.

Here’s the breadcrumb path for you:

Stories are a series of events; narrative is the meaning we assign to those series of events.

And the thing that defines that narrative, that meaning that we are all so addicted to?

It comes from change.

There is no narrative in things that stay the same. It is only through change that we can say, “This was the state of things, now this different situation is the state of things, and here is why.”

We see change, we aim to understand it, we build a narrative around that change, and we live according to that narrative for as long as we can, until a complicated world fucks with how we see things…

…and we ourselves change in response to that fuckery.

Now, the way we change is sometimes that we hold on even tighter to the thing we believed, and refuse to let go even in the face of overwhelming rational evidence that it’s bullshit.

Or, we acknowledge the bullshit, somehow find the courage to release our death grip on the thing that gave us a sense of stability and safety, float around for a while with no real anchor, and get really freaked out and uncomfortable, until we see another big thing floating by that we can attach our sense of self to and grab on for dear comfort.

Or, we decide to float, unanchored, never really too sure of anything, but at least knowing that we’re not being pulled into badness because we’re too afraid to let go of the solid thing we grabbed onto, which is not necessarily interested in avoiding badness.

It’s all stories.

And so now, I’ve chosen to float, to be uncomfortable out here in open space without giving in to the toxic impulses that give me comfort at too high a cost.

I want to allow myself to not agree with people who I think might be wrong… but only if it doesn’t bother anyone or make them mad at me.

Float.

I want to be able to sit with the people I love as they engage with their empowerment to solve their own goddamn problems…but if it is within my power to solve their problems and I don’t, it’s like someone just covered my entire body in itchy wool and I just have to sit there in it, sweating and shifting around and getting more uncomfortable by the second.

Float.

I want to be able to trust my own judgment on something and still be okay with being wrong sometimes, even though wrong is something I feel like I’m not allowed to be.

Float.

I’m learning to float. It’s uncomfortable, and I see sturdy rocks with easy handholds going by all the time, and each time I see one there’s a moment, always a moment, when I think, I could just grab hold and this discomfort would be over, but I don’t.

I won’t.

I can’t.

I float.

Thus proving, once and for all, that people do change.

Everything,

L