Welcome to the Wheel of Change

I've been reading an awesome book called Next is Now. The book isn’t about change, but “about The change” that we “live through every day.” Since finishing the first third of the book, I've realized how resistant I am to change, even when I don’t mean to be.

By that I mean, I resist change without even thinking about it. Ignoring change, even when I know I should embrace it, has become a habit.

Which leads me to another book that I just finished: The Power of Habit. It’s another book I highly recommend and one that I think goes well with Next is Now because it discusses why people form habits and how to change them. Between these two books, I’ve slowly beginning to realize why I’m not as change-resilient as I could be.

Change scares me.

Habits are familiar, safe, and don’t require me to think too much about them. Change is new, unfamiliar, and requires a lot of mental power. To embrace change is to be consciously aware that I am doing something out of the norm.

It’s exhausting.

But change isn’t some big event that we one day wake up to. It’s a constant condition of life. Sure, there’s some predictability and familiarity with certain changes. Every year without fail Apple releases a new iPhone with shiny new upgrades and thousands of people are perfectly happy to pay for it.

It’s the change we know that we need to make, but don’t want to that’s really difficult. Like starting a diet to become healthier or investing in a new computer before the current one dies in a blaze of glory. It’s easy to fall into the trap that doing things the old way, that when it fails it fails spectacularly. I’m talking blue-screen-of-death-your-life’s-work-has-just-been-erased spectacularly.

Thankfully we backed everything up on a floppy disk, right?

Ha ha nope. No modern computer uses a floppy disk. Some don’t even have USB slots anymore. Everything is in the “cloud”.

The whole evolution of how we save our computer files drastically changed in less than 20 years. I remember having to use floppy disks freshmen year of high school.

But sometimes change isn’t as simple as to where I store my backup files. It can be really hard and life altering.

Around this time last year, my anxiety had hit an all time high. I was struggling with even the simplest social interactions. I constantly felt like my life was out of my control. Part of me was convinced that I could handle it on my own. I just needed time to sort out my thoughts, connect with friends and family, not screw everything up...oh crap I just did!

The other, more depressed part of me, knew I couldn’t keep living the way I was. I was just going through the motions of life and not really living it.

I prefer not to go into the details of everything that was going on, but I do feel that being honest about them is more liberating than trying to pretend everything is okay. Because I wasn’t okay.

Looking back on everything, I feel really pathetic. I don’t know what exactly I was scared of. It took a lot of support (especially from one of my aunts), but I was finally able to embrace the changes necessary to take care of my mental health.

That’s a drastic example and I hope I learned from the experience not to wait so long to see someone about a health issue. Change is constant and it is everywhere. It’s a fact that I’m always reminded of.

Coincidentally I’ve been seeing the word “change” around a lot lately. It’s been in my horoscope (or as I pronounce it horror-scope) reading almost daily. Embracing change is part of my company’s message with the release of the new book. I’ve also run into it in some of my favorite TV shows and the books I'm reading. The word has been popping up so much, that I'm trying not to take it as a sign.

And more often than not, change is good.

For those of you who don’t know, May is Mental Health Awareness Month. For my last post in May, I wanted to include a little bit about how hard it was for me to admit that I needed to take care of my mental health. Since making the choice to take better care of myself, things have been a lot better. There are still some bad days, but I'm having a lot more good ones. Getting help and taking care of yourself shouldn't be shameful or seen as weak. Don't be afraid to talk to your doctor about finding a specialist to help you.

If you are feeling suicidal, don't hesitate to call, 1-800-273-8255, to speak to someone.

Until next week.

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