“Change is hard,” she said.
And my arrogant need to correct her slipped out.
“Try not to say it’s hard, that makes it harder.”
Shit. Breathe. I’m often too far out ahead.
Mindfully, I recovered and silenced myself. Making space for her brain to process what IT REALLY TAKES to change yourself to change your life to feel easier, calmer and a whole long list of other words ending in -er.
Anything but what it currently is, when it doesn't feel like it’s working.
She filtered a few more thoughts past me and then said, “yeah. It takes a lot of work, huh?”
I nodded. “It IS hard. You’re right. You’re changing several decades of habits and patterns. It won’t happen overnight. That’s the nature of behavioral change. That’s why most people don’t do it and complain instead. It’s quite the challenge.”
“YES!” she exclaimed, sounding relieved. “Challenge. That’s a good word.”
And this conversation happened on a bench where I sat feeling more free and calm than ever in my life. Feelings that were a result of many years of work and intentional effort to change and be a human being who embodies LOVE — the one thing over which we have any and all control.
I internalized this profound shift rather anticlimactically a few weeks ago.
After spending close to 20 years suffering and struggling, there is now total peace.
And I’m writing to share it so you, too, might experience it if you choose.
It started with two phone calls. It was really that easy. But making those calls took a lot of courage and the work that went into summoning that courage took a long time. Like my friend on that bench was coming to understand, the big stuff of life is never settled or resolved with the quick fixes folks seek out. It will really *take* some effort on your part, but the rewards are equal in amount.
Before I share the content and results of those calls, I’ll share some background. For the past few years, I’ve spent Christmas alone. And each year, I wrote about those experiences in part to process the deep feelings I had about waking up alone on Christmas day — which, as you can probably imagine, wasn’t the easiest thing.
Each of those years, I wrote from grief, loneliness, desolation and maybe a bit of hopelessness. If you’ve had a Christmas or even a day or two (or several hundred) like that, you know the feelings I’m describing.
As this year rolled around and another holiday season approached. I didn’t want to write another “woe is me” post, despite the good I think they did for myself or others. I began to see nothing incredibly inspiring about them. Yes, they were good for catharsis, which was essential to my healing process, but I didn’t think another one would be much of a contribution. Instead, I chose to take time away from writing the whole month of December. I just wanted to be with whatever was coming up, and not have to churn it into sweet butter for the masses to consume.
Over those weeks of self-imposed writerly silence, I felt a huge lack of integrity within myself. I felt no compulsion to put more content into the blogosphere that wouldn’t leave someone really rocked to the core with something substantial to take away and use. I saw a great disparity between who I felt myself to be, who people experienced me as and who I was being.
So, I signed myself back up for specific personal development work to get past my personal blind spots to be a more effective person. What did I want from it, specifically? How to overcome feelings of distance and disconnection I felt between myself and all the human beings around me each day.
And it worked, dammit. I feel like I finally have something useful to share.
How I accomplished it began with believing that it IS good if you think of your life as a constant (and exciting!) challenge instead of an inconvenient problem to solve or fix and then complain about endlessly. I started thinking of life like that in high school and have used it like a compass ever since. And many times I lose that compass and my perspective and give over to complaining. Because, if you haven’t noticed, life doesn’t really get easier. The hits don’t stop coming. Things we want or need come and go without our permission. Life isn’t a mountain you climb only to reach the “top” and announce, “YES! I did it. Phew. I think I’ll just sit here on this perch and not move for the rest of the time I have.”
As long as you are energy in motion (which you are), you’re going to come up against other energy in motion (people, places, things). Some/many of which will not be going with your flow. Hence: conflict.
Conflict isn’t the problem, however.
Your responses to each and every experience (pleasant or otherwise) determine the course of your life. If you live avoiding or evading conflict instead of inviting it, dodging discomfort or rejection, you spend your life playing defense. You nurture inclinations toward reactivity. These habits and patterns become who you are, until you can’t even see them. They become your blind spots. They become the ways of being that keep you as you are, and things as they are. And you scratch your head wondering why things don’t change or feel better when you slap a new coat of paint on yourself: new eating habits, a gym membership, a new haircut, a new outfit! And another one!
A new job.
A house.
A marriage.
A few kids.
Some or none of these.
You’ve been thinking that all these count as changes. Why aren’t they working?
Because they are all variations on a theme of fixing to avoid fear instead of finding freedom.
The alternative is to embrace all experiences as essential to your growth, however unpleasant they may be. To seek not to change as much to transform. I’ve come to understand is that the MORE unpleasant or challenging the experience, the more growth becomes possible. But only if it is taken head-on and embraced as essential to your betterment. Most people only see the difficult part and focus on the discomfort, not realizing the discomfort exists to shake you free of the patterns that got you where you are, the ones that aren’t serving you well.
The discomfort is a warning bell, an internal alarm that something isn’t right. If you confuse feeling good with feeling better — instant gratification can confuse the longer term need for lasting inner peace — you will settle for the short-term fix over the long-term overhaul.
Speaking from experience of overhauls, there are very few reinventions I haven’t tried on myself. I’ve pierced my nose and both my ears a few times and taken those out and decorated my body with my own handwriting in the form of tattoos. I’ve known men and women and lovers and intimate friends. I’ve been a militant vegetarian who now eats bacon and I once stood in the front of a classroom as an 8th-grade teacher, but I don’t anymore. I’ve worn my hair from two feet long to two inches. For most of my life, I’ve used myself and my existence as an experiment in change and I’ve come to understand something about all these things I’ve done, said, been, had or identities I’ve claimed:
it’s fun if I don’t associate any of the changes with a sense of lasting peace, inner happiness, getting “there” or it being “more me”. It’s most effective when the real change comes from within myself — how I leave people feeling, how well I listen to them, what words I speak to and about them, the wide berth I leave for the wrecking balls of their transformation, how much I share, what I give and take, how well I care for my mind and body, the freedom I give myself for my own imperfection and the sense of adventure and lack of attachment I bring to each and every moment and experience.
When I finally understood this, I was sitting on a straight-backed chair and it sort of settled into my bones, like when Sam Wheat slides into Oda Mae’s body in the movie, GHOST.
I got it. After close to 20 years of trying to think freedom into existence, I just felt it. A switch flipped ON in my brain and all the cells in my body adjusted. All those years of intentional internal and external shifts finally aligned like the gears in Alan Turing’s enigma machine.
And I went downstairs and called my mother. We last spoke in March as part of an estrangement that began a few years ago.
The next day, I called my former good friend and partner. It was the first time we’d spoke in 15 months.
And in two phone calls, I found and changed something that had been eluding me for years. It was an itch I couldn’t scratch, buried so deeply I couldn’t even find it to reach it if I wanted to.
It had taken me hours and days and weeks and months and YEARS of thinking, talking, journaling and suffering to reach this conclusion: I was not being love, the total and complete access to forgiveness and lasting freedom.
Before this moment, the rate of my change process had been agonizing. I finally gave up trying to force it and, not surprisingly, it began coming to me for the past few weeks, like aspects of a dream you wake up from and try to summon back into your consciousness or the name of someone you met and need to recall later.
You pull it from nothingness into total existence.
I’d been watching the movie, Interstellar (with Matthew McConaughey) on repeat for weeks, completely transfixed and compelled by the plot that focused on the transcendent power of L-O-V-E and the reason for our existence. Then, I found the same message by watching CONTACT with Jodie Foster (and Matt McConaughey, again!) — a film I’d loved but barely understood as a 17-year-old kid.
And watching it all these years later, I GOT IT. All the metaphors about space and time and energy and matter and the Great Unknown of black holes. It was not science fiction but fact; I saw them as ways to describe the process of life. I understood the complete and total surrender that replaces all fear when both characters in two movies almost two decades apart say, “what happens now?!”
I felt that surrender during and after the phone calls I made that were all about forgiveness. When I’d allowed however much time and protective feelings were necessary to reach a place where those feelings no longer served me. I could feel myself outgrowing them like a plant that needs a new pot.
I’ve always been like this. I have a higher threshold than many people, but when I’m there — I’m THERE. And just like that, the past is over. I’ve transformed. An internal turn of a dial, subtle and profound simultaneously. An itch sufficiently scratched.
I saw that the blog posts and status updates I’d been writing for the past years, pitting poor me against those who ‘rejected’ me, kept weaving a story that made me right and them wrong. And I saw I could be right forever or find freedom for me AND them. I saw, in that moment of self-responsibility, that we are all here to provide more light and love and freedom to each human being. Anything we do to prevent that hinders us and our expansion and impact to leave people better than we found them.
Anything else we do from arrogance and self-protection is nothing that brings us lasting peace and fulfillment.
During those phone calls, I didn’t try to force forgiveness to be a better person. I felt forgiveness first and shared it and became a better version of myself as a result. I allowed my mother whatever time she needed to process my gender transition. I stopped silencing her to allow for my own comfort because doing so wasn’t actually feeling comfortable at all. I forgave my former friend for never choosing a romantic relationship, the kind I thought I wanted with her but perhaps never really needed.
Years of suffering evaporated in mere minutes.
A sense of peace that felt elusive for so long was within my power the whole time, but not until I allowed it. Not until I surrendered to a lot of time and work to change. Not until I became adequately annoyed at myself for claiming to be positive and loving, forgiving and kind, but avoiding areas where I was being anything BUT.
Not until I experienced deep, dark resignation and sat with the complexity of imperfect humanity (starting with my own) could I find the simple but complex truth that made the realization possible.
Not until I could stop running from it and see my own delusion around it could I choose it no longer.
And once I realized it, it was impossible not to share the freedom of that forgiveness, that feeling of unlimited love.
Look, I don’t think the whole ‘outer space’ thing isn’t just there to be pretty and dazzling. If we are from stardust, we humans are systems like the planets and stars and galaxies all around us. And a system in collapse is also moving forward — the opposite of that is complacency and stagnation. It’s why I’m so drawn to change and the destruction that’s inherent, to become the best version of what’s possible.
And sitting on the other side, having swung my legs over the fence to hang out in this place of tranquility, I’ve begun to wonder if change toward being LOVE isn’t really hard at all?
What if our resistance to change, the pain of all that stagnation, is what people really complain about?
And we humans are all acting this out with or against each other, constantly trying to mold each other into our arrogant visions and projections of what we think best suits us and/or them, seeking freedom from suffering and struggle but causing more of it each and every day with our opinions and versions of what’s “right”.
Meanwhile, the freedom I’ve found has nothing to do with any of that. Having tried it all for so many years, it’s quite humbling and amusing to view my behavior from a distance. All that ineffective fumbling at finding freedom for myself and others.
This way feels right and real.
For now. ;)
