Loose Change

Tonight, change feels more familiar than consistency. Gus and I have faced career changes, birth, death, divorce, remarriage, abduction, failed friendships and severed relationships. New jobs, new plans, new perspective. In fifteen years, we've had thirteen addresses. Together, we have moved more than five thousand miles and lived in four cities. We've lost and we've found. Started and restarted. Failed and succeeded. Said goodbye to the familiar and introduced ourselves to the unfamiliar, finding the confidence to step into the mix. Time and time again, we've mustered the gumption to learn a new way, a new word, a new world.

Personally, I have let go of the inalienable. I have had predictable turn into utter insanity. I've tried to normalize crazy and vice versa. I've lost what I thought was sacrosant. Had my life change so acutely that I feel it rise up my spine in a cold sweat, a heat that travels from the crown of my head to my face and settles there. At times it's like having no skin: feeling nothing at all and feeling absolutely everything.

Sometimes I hate the change I've faced and sometimes I'm proud of it. Sometimes my exposure to change gives me incredible strength and sometimes it leaves me weak and heavy. One day I may love what I've seen and done and experienced and the next I'll long for a life lived within arm's reach, surrounded by the familiar, seemingly untouched by the difficult unknown.

This post feels jumbled, but that's the way change presents itself to me, the way it rattles around this way and that in my brain. I think about the way change can simultaneously love me and hate me, accept me and reject me. I know some of this is my perspective - I've experienced more than some and less than others and like everyone, I get caught up in my own life and experiences and how they measure up. I do know that more-than-the-usual change and its effects are something I struggle with, at some level, every day and it is a huge part of my life experience.

It's difficult for me to even end this post, since this internal (and external) dialogue is so ongoing. I know I've brought up stuff in this post that I haven't explained and some if it I can't even do that. For now, I just have to leave it as an open topic, something to revisit as life continues to change and I try to adapt as best I can.