Change

Over the last few months, I have been thinking a lot about change. What it means to change as a person, and have change happen to you.

Recently I bought a book about change. Made it through 20 odd pages before I decided it wasn’t for me. I don’t think managing your own personal change from the guise of business “experts” is the right way to do anything. But it has a (potentially made up) stat from some study in it that the average person will go through 36~ change events in their life*. That seems like a lot to me.

For most people my age (I am only 31, thanks I know I look good for my age), the major life changes will be things like moving house, changing jobs, or having children. But when I think about change as a concept, it is often negative. You were doing well at something, then one day it all changed, and you lost your job. Or you lost your house because your shitty landlord decided the rent was too low. Or having children didn’t work out.

I often feel admiration for people who go through change and make it through to the other side. I get to see them thriving and being their best (or at least, the ones who are open about the change). They try and turn that negative change into a positive one. That friend who lost their job 8 months ago, found something new and is excited to begin fresh somewhere better. The change fucking sucks the moment it happens, and for a long time after. But we are privileged where we are in the world to try and move on.

Obviously I can point to something like my heart surgery as a huge change event in my life. It has physically and mentally changed everything about me. I don’t think I am the same person I was 2 years ago in such sweeping ways I can’t describe. When I was in hospital recovering and infected, I remember sobbing and begging the nurses to let me be normal. I didn’t want to change, I felt fine with my life as it was. But the change had already happened, there was nothing I could do to stop it.

A few months ago I asked a few people whether they thought I had changed as a person. I think I was always good and fair, but the consensus was that I had changed. I asked someone “how” and they said “I don’t know, you just have”. Fair, because it’s something I also can’t articulate, and I was trying to get someone else to do it for me. The change feels so total I might as well be a different person. A doppelgänger placed in this body which ticks loudly, living a life that wasn’t built by them.

Before The Event, I would walk home from work every time I was in the office from the job I was in at the time. It’s about 5km, takes about an hour up and down the Sheffield hills (who built a city here man). After heart surgery, that’s a long fucking way. It was a goal because it felt like I should be doing it. Paradoxically I wanted to move on from the change by going back to the way things were before.

When I finally made the walk from the office back home, on the route up the winding roads I would take from years gone, the journey was complete, and I cried. I said to my wife it was nice to feel normal. I imagine people at my work, or those around me when I did things like played Magic on an evening had no idea how much that little bit of normalcy meant to me.

But there is a reality that after change it can’t go back to how it was, not really. Reaching that milestone didn’t fill the hole in me the way I thought it would. Every milestone I have set myself for the last 18 months has felt like that. It's a bottomless void which consumes whatever I try and fill it with. The axe forgets, but the tree remembers.

Given the space of time, I have changed for the better. Not physically, obviously. There is only so much an artificial ascending aorta can be a benefit over a natural squishy blood vessel (the main benefit being that I get to be alive). But mentally I am a lot more dedicated to the things in my life, and the people around me. I wrote previously about having “infinite time”, and a few months on, that’s even more true. There’s so much I want to do, and hopefully enough time to do it.

Since last summer I have been wanting to run. In November I started my plan for that, with daily 4k increasingly fast walks bobbing up and down the hills of Sheffield. 2 weeks ago I finally made it, and I ran 5k. It was slow (43 minutes), but it was complete. It is hard to appreciate how difficult this has been. But I am better for the journey and having completed it. I’ve done it 9 more times in the last 2 weeks, and will hopefully do it more. Maybe it is weird to feel grateful to have come so close to dying, and not. I am grateful. My life will never be the same. That’s okay. Maybe it’s even right.

If we have on average 36 change events in our life, and I can point to like ~10 in my life so far, then I am terrified for the other 26. But I know that it doesn’t have to be bad. Even when it’s the worst thing imaginable.

I will continue to set myself small incremental milestones. When I reach that next milestone, and I come out the other side unfulfilled, I will try again for the next one. Maybe I will just keep doing that until I can’t anymore.

*I don’t know if actually dying counts as a life changing event in the study. It would be a bit annoying shortchanged on one life changing event because dying is counted.