Everything Has Changed
and yet it all feels the same
The flowers are beginning to bloom as spring sneaks her way in, gentle, warm, and beautiful. I took last week off from this little space to appreciate the growth, both the new greenery of spring and the less green growth of myself. The thing I had been looking forward to and simultaneously dreading had unfolded as I expected. As with most big, high-pressure things in life, there is a certain allure that somehow, once the thing happens, everything will be different. But I have climbed enough mountains, started and then ended enough relationships, and reached enough milestones to know that one thing, moment, or achievement will rarely create change immediately noticeable to you, the one waiting to be changed by the said thing.
I am now an Author, capital A. Yay. That is a change, but also, nearly nothing has changed (minus all of you now being able to know almost, and I mean almost, everything about me, also, yay?). Change is slow and persistent. With the slow fade from day to night and then the rise again from night to day, it is often not a moment but a process.
When I look back at my life on March 31st and then again on April 1st (the tiny space between when I wasn't and then became an author), I notice zero changes. But when I look back at the girl who wrote the book inside my garden shack in the first months of COVID-19 and the girl standing surrounded by the love of people she now allows in, much has changed. The process is processing.
I have been busy doing interviews about this, that, and the other things. Yay! I also have been the napkin for a two-year-old. I spent a whole day this week cleaning my basement, wondering if I could die from inhaling dried bits of dead spiders mixed with five years of storage dust. Yay! Life maintains its balance, and if you make the right choices, it can feel surreal and exceedingly real at the same time.
People ask, “How is the book doing?” I smile and say what I know. "Good. It's all been wonderful." Unless you ask Emily on an unnamed review platform, because she thinks it is a shame that I wasted both her time and mine, droning on about my internal struggles. Sorry, Emily! Or Chad on another unnamed platform, who doesn't want to hear another story about a woman with mommy issues. Or, unless you ask my mother. But to save Emily, and maybe you, from having to endure any more of my droning on, I will be concise and say it is not all wonderful. But it is all beautiful.
It is the very real process of deciding to show up and tell your story with all its flaws (and droning) and then feeling better when you get truly uplifting messages from people who say they can't stop thinking about some particular part or didn't want it to end. Katie sent me a direct message telling me that reading my words allowed her to forgive herself, and she woke up feeling like everything in her world had changed. That was a lovely message.
And everything in my world has changed too, but not in the big bang event sort of way. More in the slow turn of one thing into the next kind of way. A sunrise. The most exciting thing this last week wasn't that my book entered the world, sold well out of the gates, or got some nice reviews. All that is happening alongside the truly exciting changes; the arrow leaf flowers on the hill in front of my house finally burst open in unison. My daughter lost a tooth. My husband joined me for a run. I learned the word obsequious and got to use it. I laughed as Emily splashed over her knees into a surprise spring trail puddle on a run (no, not that Emily, I am not wasting any more of her time).
The magic of life is rarely distilled into significant milestones or events. It is genuinely in the daily slow process of change that we are all in. And that is wonderful.