craft change

I moved from Dallas to Ada, OK, a town smaller than its name over Labor Day weekend. A three bedroom house packed in three days. And my mom laid out in a pallet in the backseat. After breaking up with my boyfriend, giving away my two cats and dog, we drove for 2 ½ hours to the ER; checked in at the hotel around 4 AM, and stayed there for 2 months.

It’s been going on 4 months now, and it's been a trip. I had no clue the Red River really marked the entrance to, well, if not the Twilight Zone, an entirely different world.

The first staff meeting should have been a sign. When asked about what he did on vacation the week before, one of my future coworkers talked about qualifying for his right-to-carry license. And berated his wife for misloading a bullet. (A single bullet, mind you, after several hours and several rounds from differing types of rifles and pistols.)

Before going on a tangent about his rather passionate, impressively narrow political preferences (which included, but were not limited to, mindless, murdering Muslims, and domestic terrorists (also known as liberals). And we worked for a branch of HR. Yeah, fun times. 

It took three months to find friends, 2 ½ months to find a ranch style 3 bedroom house (or something comparable). I found a faith community the week after Christmas.

I read in a blog post recently change is good and healthy, that we were created to change. It’s a great theory, and I even say I'd intrinsically agree. 

Except.

Change is hard, and humans, with all our wonderful textures, have weak spots we'd much prefer to have comforted rather than changed. Change nips at those weak spots, blurring perspective with doubt, or worse, ghosts of changes past. Change reminds of what was taken, and rarely of what was given.

Change means, by its very definition, what was will not be again. No matter how similar it looks or feels, change means a difference. 

And there's a reason no one changes without a reason to: because you will be different afterwards. And there's no way to know how you will be changed; only that you will be.

How terrifyingly freeing a thought.

I have to confess, I am not a big change-lover. I have been me for long enough I know me. I know how I think, I know what I like, and I have to say, I treat me pretty dang well.

I like me. I don't have to change for me.

Except.

I know me. And given the choice between a mundane, uneventful, taupe-colored sort of life full of security and being able to tell the story of a life which includes lines like "So that's when I saw the European chocolate delivery truck pull into the gun range and I decided to stop following it," or "I left my home state, closest intimates, and everything familiar to live among people I have nothing in common with,"  I'd choose taupe.

Because I have not changed enough to know consistently what is best for me. 

The familiar would decide my future because it was known, not because it was good. I'd continue to not trust because I'd been hurt in the past, or rush in because waiting took too much time (or so I thought when I was younger).

Trusting those different wouldn't occur. And nothing in my world would be different than it was before.

Except.

Time would pass. Planets would spin. Things, events outside my realm and scope would shift and happen.

And I would miss all of it. Because all I could see, my world would be a safe, familiar taupe-colored once-home. I'd miss out on the quirky mid-century cottage slowly being crafted on the other side of my fear.