How to Not Be Smooshed By Change
Why we resist it, why we need it, how to let it happen. Yellow Brick Road.
Welcome to Yellow Brick Road, an exploration of the guided path!! If you’re interested in supporting this work further, go ahead and subscribe!
No lesson has kicked my ass more than learning to stop grasping at what begs to be released and transformed.
Of the many things I could consider my childhood, stable is not one of them. Adaptability was a learned behavior of survival state. I became accustomed to anticipating change with hyper-vigilance, shapeshifting and holding infinite space for the unknown so I wouldn’t be disappointed when life’s only constant - change - arrived on time. As a young adult, I lived in scarcely furnished apartments where artwork stayed leaning against walls until my lease was up rather than mounted on them to say “someone lives here.” That is, until I found a few things worth sticking around for and nurturing - a career I could only dream of, a soul tribe, and of course…myself.
Growth requires roots and firm foundations so you can shake and shimmy with the winds of change while remaining grounded in rich soil.
I can’t pinpoint exactly when stability became so important to me but probably when I moved to the most chaotic place in the world to pursue a statistically unlikely career in the literal middle of my twenties. There was a cap on the quality of friendships, creative projects, and chosen family I could hold space for if I didn’t value change. You have to revere change like the power of the ocean unless you wish to get swept in its undertow. You have to observe change, wait for the tide to come in and let yourself get swept away in flow.
In recent years, I’ve let myself drift out of survival toward the wonders of the unknown. As someone who is literally obsessed with stability and routine as a cue for safety, this was scary. It still is. I’ve attempted to define what safety truly means in the context of change. I want a life that can only be described as full, and I suspect I would have to loosen grip on control enough to let something bigger and better to find its way into my orbit.
Early pandemic, I acquired many plants in my anxiousness over not having anything to take care of but myself (we’ll unpack l8r).
Stressed? Buy a plant. Happy? Buy a plant. Bored? Buy a plant.
Tending to something predisposed to flourish under certain conditions I could easily and routinely provide was soothing in a time of such uncertainty and not getting reward for productivity elsewhere. A few months prior to moving into my one bedroom apartment in Bed Stuy, my plants stopped growing in my two bedroom in Flatbush as though my own stagnant energy was cramping its style. Worried about their health, I was playing with watering schedules, shifting them from corner to corner, window to window, poking holes in the soil to give them better drainage. Nothing worked, but they weren’t dying. They just simply remained, a concept that was deeply uncomfortable to me as I geared up for a year of the most potent change of my career, emotional state, love life, and awareness thus far.
I started 2021 by finding home for the first time, which you might have guessed became the inspiration for this work. Living with college roommates and friends of a past life for my early 20’s had come to an end, and it was time to claim my own space and discover my energy in a new way through a recently found sense of financial security (terrifying), creative sovereignty, and emotional safety.
When I moved into my new apartment, my plants got an upgrade as well. I bought each of them a new pot bigger than the last. As I sat on my stool, digging my fingers between the soil and the sides of terracotta to gently lift my babies from their old home, it became clear that my plants had not stopped growing months ago. Instead of growing new leaves and stretching up to the sky at the surface, they’d dug deeper. Contorting, tangling, wrapping through and around themselves, the roots forged ahead with the plants life work and grew four times the plant’s height. While I waited impatiently to reap visible signs of flourish and blossom, my plant knocked at the walls of its pot begging for a chance to show the world its maturation. The pot was too damn small.
Change is the process through which something becomes different. Transformation occurs most where light doesn’t reach, where grit and sap meet to become newness. Even in survival, we are in the process of change - as a plant will continue to root even if it’s not safe enough to thrive. It’s not necessarily the action of moving homes, changing jobs, or becoming single, but rather every interaction, moment, and shift in perspective leading up to it. In interest of persisting, I often have to remind myself of what I gain from accepting and fostering change (everything), interrogate why I resist change (fear, bitch), and creating solutions to mitigate being frazzled as fuck every single time change knocks at my door.
Here are some non-exhaustive considerations to make when processing change in real time without resisting growth:
Think about where change is most likely already occurring! By the time you feel pressed to create change, you’ve already received change. Change has already occurred at the cellular level. Think of change as the chrysalis rather than the butterfly itself. Let’s say you decide to make a move to California - you probably already felt a pull to be in the sun, to have proximity to the beach, to live near family, to put yourself in a place more conducive with with where you’re at in life. The realization that you need and want something different is the change itself. You’ve already recognized a need to be fulfilled, a thirst to be quenched, a shift within your internal dialogue saying “something different will make a difference,” and the physical manifestation of this change is simply the final push toward a new way of being. But make no mistake, by the time you are aware that change must be made and shedding occurs, it’s already within you.
Have grace for the fact that our brains are hardwired to keep us safe, but doesn’t always have enough information to accurately assess safety in the midst of change. What if you aren’t the best at this new role or creative pursuit? What if you don’t have the money to survive in a new city? What if you end up going on dates with a lot of duds after a breakup? What if old feelings of doubt and worry resurface, and you don’t know how to handle them? This is our monkey mind trying to assess risk, but they are questions, sometimes anxieties, and don’t necessarily require a reaction or response from us.
Change comes with threats to safety, whether they are founded or not. This is the most obvious reason why I think we resist change. For example, if you grew up in a home where abuse or neglect lurked around corners, your brain may identify staying in a relationship where your needs are disregarded and boundaries ignored as more “safe” because it is an evil it knows how to process. If in adulthood, you still haven’t experienced healthy relationship dynamics, your brain hasn’t acquired enough information to identify safety when it appears. You may reject open arms, honesty, and kindness simply because it is unknown, but this is an unfounded threat and there is an opportunity to respond differently/receive.
There are, however, real threats in change. Let’s say you choose to move from a small town to NYC and are concerned about financial strife - the threat of not being able to make rent is very real. Alternatively, change can come with loss of a person, place, familiarity, a certain level of comfort, and ultimately, we still may have to choose ourselves and our growth above the perceived threats. That doesn’t erase the tough stuff. Change can be so closely connected to trauma - too much too fast - and acknowledging disappointments, losses, and resurfaced emotions is often where change works most of its magic on us.
We tend to gaze back at the past or even present with rose-colored glasses, romanticizing the good ol’ days with selective memory. I hear this a lot in reference to returning back to “normal” after Covid restrictions let up, but what was normal and were you actually enjoying it? In our desperation to experience familiarity again, we may be forgetting the commitment to productivity over happiness ruling our lives pre-Covid, the impulsive social overextension, and poor emotional and spiritual hygiene we were operating in before change hit us like a ton of bricks.
When it’s time to break up with someone who is we’ve outgrown, we can’t stop thinking about the honeymoon period of the first two weeks when we met on common ground. When you get a new job offer, suddenly you wonder if your boss isn’t such a micromanaging asshole, because you’re not so sure if you have the tools and qualifications to succeed elsewhere. We are often so dazed by the overwhelming responsibility of being bigger to have bigger, we forget our deservedness is truly the only thing worth focusing on.
This doesn’t make the choice to move, shift, evolve, walk away, or walk into a new way of being any easier, even if it can be simplified. Change is fucking terrifying. The unknown is terrifying. Placing a bet on your intuition is terrifying. You have to be more committed to alignment than familiarity to really enact or allow change to move through you.
I think sometimes we get stuck in the neverending story of ‘“if I knew then what I know now,” even while we’re in the now. We replay that final argument in the relationship, the misstep at work, the illusion we can make what we currently have fit into the reality of what we need and deserve if we just try a bit harder, exhaust one more option, shift the watering schedule a bit. Ultimately, we end up smooshing our roots into a “too small” pot and getting ourselves all tangled up. Familiarity with something else outside of you is not a reason to lose familiarity with your alignment. Alignment will always call for change, and anything but change will feel like resistance and confusion until you’re listening for the call and willing to wander toward its source.
Finally, understand that change is a long and winding road and priorities shift as you do, a reconfiguration rendering most of your life unrecognizable. It is felt intensely and almost never understood except in retrospect, and that’s because you’re supposed to be living your life, not spectating.
“You have to be more committed to alignment than familiarity to really enact or allow change to move through you.”
I felt that in my bones. Thank you for creating & sharing this piece ✨