Notes on Change
When I was younger, I’d walk through town with my family in the summer. I’d watch my brother trying to trip my sister up and I’d laugh at my mum’s weak attempt to keep a straight face when telling them off. We’d follow her through the shops and incessantly ask when she’d be done or if she would tell our dad that we had misbehaved when he got home from work that night. We’d fight over rogue 20p coins for the gumball machine and cringe when people we knew saw us bickering. I’ve since learned that it’s these sorts of mundane moments of childhood that mean the most. It’s the ones that are so unassuming that you wish you could go back and bottle to save for emergencies. But in the midst of these summer moments, I’d remember. I’d remember and my heart would race and my hands would shake and my stomach would drop. It was a kind of panic that spread heat over my skin and took the floor out from under my feet. I’d shut my eyes and count to ten and hope the feeling would pass. All because I’d remembered that the first day of school was around the corner.
I am a worrier. I worry about what to say and who to say it to. I worry when my friends are worrying. I worry that I’ll be too late for an appointment or too early for a reservation. I worry that I’ll be too much for some people and not enough for others. I pace around my house when I’m waiting for a text back and I scratch away the polish on my nails when I don’t know the answer to a question I’ve been asked. The first days at school were no different. I’d worry that my uniform would be itchy or my shoes would be too big. I’d worry about new teachers or new classrooms: where my seat would be and who it would be next to. I’d worry that I wouldn’t be smart enough for my classes or funny enough to make friends. I’d worry myself to the point of exhaustion; it was utterly exhausting to not be able to deal with change.
If I had had it my way, I would have had the same teacher and the same classmates from age 5 to age 18. I would have stayed in the same school and ate the same lunch at the same time. I would have been a natural at the first extracurricular I tried and I would have gone on to become the very first thing I ever said I wanted to be when I grew up. And I would have been miserable.
So many of the best things I have are the product of change. Change gave me my closest friends and my fondest memories. It handed me hope on a silver platter: hope that fifteen-year-old me wouldn’t feel sad forever and that seventeen-year-old me would eventually get over them. If it wasn’t for change, I’d still have blonde in my hair and be using the same mascara I saw in a YouTube video when I was 12. There would be conversations that never happened, books that were never read and songs that were never played. Feelings would still be secret and opinions would remain unshared. Life would be static.
Tomorrow is my last first day of University. When I typed that, my heart started to race and my hands started to shake and my stomach began to drop. The thought of starting a new year, and the last new school year at that, makes me worry. I’m worried about all of the same things I worried about last year and the year before that. I’m worried that by worrying, I’m disappointing a younger version of myself somewhere who thought that this way of thinking was a side effect of growing up, that it would be something I’d grow out of by the time I was twenty. But most of all, I’m worried about what might change. In fact, the only difference between how I used to deal with change and how I deal with it now is that I’m not scared of it anymore. Sometimes I still dread it. I still sometimes find myself lying awake and making mental lists of how everything could go completely wrong. And I still sometimes wish that I could pause time, but I’m not scared. I think I’d be disappointed if I were to read this back in one year and still relate to the person who wrote it. I want sitting here and writing this on the day before school starts to exist as a moment in a series of mundanity belonging to a person I used to be. I want to change. I welcome change.