I once stumbled upon a Tumblr thread that read: People say “phase” like impermanence means insignificance. Show me a permanent state of the self.
I was reminded of this thread the other day while studying in Mac-Corry Hall, when I came across a stall covered completely with various quotes considering “change.” Scrawled in Sharpie were tiny fragments of wisdom, such as “the only constant is change,” “you still have time to change, you can be new again,” and “mobilis in mobili” which is Latin for “moving in a moving thing.”
Instead of the normal doodles of hearts or signed initials, I was surprised by the universal sentiment of the stall being change and I couldn’t help wondering what it is about this petite little word that keeps us young adults so transfixed.
Now, like many of us, my pre-frontal cortex certainly isn’t developed, but I’ve certainly changed over my years at university, as all of us have. As humans, we’re always changing, especially in our undergraduate degrees, where we’re thrust into a world of academics, dating, and drinking. For a lot of us, it’s our first time living alone, left to our own devices to cook, clean, sort our own lives, without having to answer to anybody.
If you don’t believe you’ve changed, think back to yourself during Orientation Week, moving into residence, finding your place in a big pond, a fish among fishes. Look at you now.
It goes without saying that change isn’t easy. Change is incredibly painful, and I was reminded of this when I returned from the bathroom and settled down for my class readings for ENGL 375. In class, we’re studying Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America,and the first passage I read was:
MORMON MOTHER: [Change] has something to do with God, so it’s not very nice. God splits the skin with a jagged thumbnail from throat to belly and then plunges a huge filthy hand in […] And then he stuffs them back, dirty, tangled and torn.
HARPER: And then get up. And walk around.
MORMON MOTHER: Just mangled guts pretending.
HARPER: That’s how people change.
There’s that word again: change, change, change. Something all of us fear, and all of us strive for.
It’s often easier to be stagnant, to not confront the need to change. As young adults, we’re supposed to make mistakes, have bad habits, kiss the wrong person, but we all want to know that we’ll be okay.
That’s why even when we think we’re the worst and everything is ruined, we pull out a pen to impress, even simply into a dirty bathroom stall, that things will eventually be different, so they can get better.
There’s a quote about grief that reads: “And so I process my grief by running from it, until it finds me in the middle of the street on a beautiful summer’s day.”
I think grief and change are similar—they’re hard to track, better understood with retrospect, and deeply cyclical. For me, change moves in circles. I often think I’ve moved on from old habits or old hurts until they reappear in different ways, and I have the opportunity to tackle the old challenge once more from a fresh perspective that I didn’t even realize I’d gained.
The funniest part about change is that change disguises itself. When I take a minute to reflect on the different ways I’ve changed and connected to myself over university, like the ways I’ve embraced writing, the different books I’ve read, how I’ve connected to my classes, and the relationships I’ve made with the people around me—I’m reminded of the little girl who scrawled stories in her spiral notebooks with gel pens, who inhaled Goosebumps books, and played in the sandbox with my childhood family friends.
Maybe that’s what change really is. Not becoming someone entirely new but returning to yourself in different forms. We seem to want change because we need to believe things will become “better,” but perhaps, becoming better is returning and coming closer to ourselves. The girl with gel pens, the version of me sitting in Mac-Corry, writing this now—they aren’t separate people, or phases to outgrow. They’re all part of the same thing, moving in a moving thing.
I like to believe that’s why we write on bathroom stalls at all, not because we’ve figured it out, but because we haven’t. Butsomewhere between who we were, are, and who we’re trying to be, change is happening, even if we can’t see it yet.
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