Change

There's too much time for introspection these days. I miss times in my life that were purely task based, that relied upon a delicate balance of doing things and completing tasks with almost no thinking involved. When life was so busy you could barely squeeze an existential crisis into your daily schedule. Sometimes I think myself into a coma, just allowing my thoughts to fester and grow bigger than they were ever supposed to be. I don't think any person should think this much. But it's the reality at the moment, isn't it? Too much time, my brain doesn't know what to do except create false realities and convince me that the scrap of paper I threw out 3 months ago was actually home to some of the best poetry I've ever written. And I have to constantly smack my brain on the back of the hand and say shut up, which is actually hard to do considering my brain doesn't have a hand. And anyway my thoughts do this, all day, every day. 

But amongst the thinking that seems to be complete gibberish, I've had some interesting thoughts. I've thought about change and time and life and death. (You know just light things.) 

I'll never really understand how it's possible for so much to change in such a short amount of time. In a year or even a month, everything around you can look so different. I'll confess social media doesn't help, every day I willingly soak up posts that say 5 years ago today that make me stare at a photo of people I no longer speak to and think about that time 5 years ago when we not only spoke but when we were close enough to actually have a photo taken together. And I sit there looking at peoples profiles and feeds wondering what they're doing now and I wonder if they wonder about me. It's this cycle of self-induced shame and sadness. These notifications make me stare at photos of people I knew at 17 and in that photo, myself at 17 and I think about life back then in that year, in that month. I think about the people that were still alive and the things that hadn't happened yet. 

This morning I was walking my dog and I saw kids get on the bus I used to get for school and I thought about how that used to be me and how tiny they look and was I ever really that tiny? I looked down at my dog and I thought about how just the beginning of this year we had a completely different dog but now we have this one. Change is just constant and it's everywhere. Sometimes, most of the time life is so busy and fast that we don't have a chance to look around and observe the change that has been occurring. But by stopping and noticing recently, I've forced myself into this reality check. 

I've struggled in the past to accept change or to like it, I enjoy routine and comfort and stability and change doesn't marry well with that. But when I think about the changes that have occurred in the last five years I feel good about it. Most of it anyway. I've been growing, a lot more than I realised. When you're a kid you get measured quite frequently, your parents have that weird red book where they write down your heights and weights and foot sizes to see if you match up with other people your age. We used to measure our heights on the side of our living room door. It was an important thing back then to track our own progressions and changes. I haven't done that in a while. But I've been growing this whole time I just didn't realise. It's only when you look to your past that you realise just how much. It's like I'm expanding even when I don't want to be. Every day I absorb new information and form new opinions and try new things. I'm growing and changing and evolving. Most of the time I think I'm becoming a better person than I used to be. I'm edging closer every year to a better version of myself. 

And it gives me hope you see, when I look back at the me I used to be and I see that girl for all her flaws. I see the selfishness and the negativity and the lack of real autonomy and I think how much more I like the me I am right now. That gives me hope. Because if I can have drastically improved within the last five years I can only aspire to liking future versions of myself even more.