Change, adaptation and growth

This is one of those times where the words don’t come easy.

There’s that old saying, “Nothing is certain except death and taxes.” This is arguably implicit in the quote, but I’d like to add ‘change.’ Things are always certain to change. And I think that the way we deal with change to a certain degree will be a good barometer for our success or failure at a certain stage of life. I also think that there are different types of change, not just ‘good’ and ‘bad.’

The time I was hit by a car and the driver didn’t stop to see if I survived. I did, but.

There’s change that happens to you without you doing anything to create it. This is a tree falling through your house in a storm. Someone ramming into you on the highway. Someone spotting you in a pizza parlor and thinking you’d be a wonderful model (hey, it happened to Natalie Portman). Any of these things can change your life in an instant and you did nothing to earn them.

Then there’s change you create. You take some training courses after work and suddenly your able to apply for your dream job. You spend all of your spare time practicing martial arts, years getting pummeled in training and eventually you’re fighting in a world championship ring. You smoke your entire life and you develop lung problems. You drive drunk, you wreck your car.

I actually also believe there’s a third kind of change, the change that just happens to you when you refuse to take action. You’re friends with a person for years, you’d like to be something more, they would like to be something more, you both get ‘close’ but you decide not to take action because what if the moment isn’t perfect enough. Then eventually the person moves on. There’s a job posting that you’d like to apply for, but you’re not sure you’re qualified, so you wait, think that since it’s in your department, maybe they’ll ask you. It goes to someone external, with very similar qualifications, because they applied. The simplest example, you start a garden, plants grow, but you never take care of it, so birds, rodents and insects get all of the fruit.

A lot of us are going through a lot of change right now.

The pandemic was change that happened to us. We could only control how we reacted and adapted. Some of us have had to react and adapt several times.

Within all of that, life kept going. There continued to be reacting and adapting, or creating and causing. There has also been some refusal to act. None of this is meant to be judgmental. I do think it is good to determine how you like to receive change, because it is going to happen to you one way or another.

I dated someone once who actively hated change. He told me this on multiple occasions, how much he hated change. It ended up being a main factor in our relationship’s demise, because I was in a place of growth and he was desperately trying to stay comfortable. At the beginning of the end, I remember discussing with all of my close friends, at different times, that everything in my life was moving forward positively, I was really going after my dreams in acting and fitness at the time. There was just one thing that wasn’t moving. When everything else is going up, the thing that doesn’t move starts to look like it’s going down.

This was not the biggest show I did in Chicago, but it was definitely one of my favorites.

Let’s be honest, it’s difficult to like change actively. Even change for the better is uncomfortable. You have to learn new things, you have to stretch yourself, you have to let go of old things. Even old things that weren’t good for you are sometimes easier because you’ve been doing them.

Without actively deciding to, I chose a life rife with change.

Acting is constant change. New groups of people, new shows, new auditions, new classes, new skills to learn, etc. Fitness is constant change. The group class schedule will constantly ebb and flow with the demands of members. You will constantly learn and grow through continuing education and exposure to different modalities. Personal training will constantly change based on clients schedule and knowledge gained. Even my writing has constantly changed. And if your work doesn’t change after the first draft, it’s doubtful that it will ever live up to it’s potential.

At some point I realized this and decided that as much as I was able, I was going to chose my change.

As painful as it was, I broke off that old relationship. I wasn’t getting what I needed after five years. I wanted someone who would put me first and joyfully integrate me with his family. Weeks after I broke up with this person, I met Dean. Phrasing it like that glosses over all of the strife I went through during that period, but I regret none of it. I pursued acting from when I was twelve until just a few years ago. At some point, it started taking more than it was giving me. I still will not say that I will never go back. But I had to step away. And each year that goes by that I haven’t done a show is easier, but it’s still strange to me. Martial arts, at least where I was doing it, was a source of joy both physically and socially for me for over ten years. At some point, it started demanding more from me than what it was giving, both in terms of time, finances and respect. I have kept on doing marital arts in some form or another this entire time, but leaving that place was hard. I carry the best of it with me though. And I will find a new place.

Saying goodbye to Chicago was so hard. I had build up so much there in nineteen years. But it was taking too much from me. In spite of how tough it was to pull up stakes, I don’t regret our move. Everything I wanted, we have here. We’re a drive away from both sets of parents rather than a flight away. We don’t have endless winter. We have a yard and can afford a house and car.

I left Chicago two years ago on February 28th. I still have moments in Nashville where I realize, in a wide-eyed, wondrous kind of way, “we live here now” because we had planned it for so long and it took so much.

Saying goodbye to Jake was the hardest. But doing nothing… waiting for change to happen… waiting for him to just leave… that would have been worse for all of us. I did my best with that. That was the worst.

Last week I said goodbye to my management job. I had thought about doing it many times. There were many times during COVID that I thought it would be done for me. (In fact, I was furloughed from a Friday to a Tuesday early on.) But in the end, I had to chose. I had taken on a new job and physically, I was able to do both part time jobs (in addition to teaching early in the morning at a gym and then training and teaching my own classes at home) for two months, but it was getting to be too much.

Yet, I was still resistant to leaving. Not only was this a company that I had been with in some form since I began teaching fitness, but it was the one job (albeit part time) that carried us through the transition from Chicago to Nashville. For several months it was our only source of income. I wasn’t getting that ‘this is the right move’ feeling in my gut. Until I did. I won’t go into what happened, but overnight, it became crystal clear to me that this job was taking much more than it was giving. And that it would continue to do so as long as I would allow it.

As soon as I pulled the trigger, I began to see ways that this was going to open things up. I could give more energy to the work that did excite me. And more energy to my own creative projects (which I was forcing myself to cram in fifteen minutes at a time when I really wanted to go to bed just to keep some momentum going). And I would have more time to spend with my family and talk to my friends.

Initially when I took on all the jobs, my thought was, “it’s COVID, there’s no where to go, I’ll just work, eat, sleep, that’s all I do anyway, right?” Turns out, no. I also like to send people emails and messages. I like to play with my kittens and watch the occasional movie with my husband. I like to have phone calls with my parents. I like to work in the yard and wash the car. I like to do my own writing. And I don’t like to just ‘cram it in’ in the few spaces that it fits.

Once again, I go forth into change, and I think it’s going to be a good one. What changes have you been going through lately?