Change

In a Word with Jacey Verdicchio

Welcome to the companion podcast to the In A Word newsletter!

This is episode four: change. (You can read the change issue of the newsletter here.)

I’ve been thinking about change a lot for the past three years. My husband named 2017 the “year of transition,” which is a gentle way of saying “year of change.” He got tenure, and I quit podcasting. I stayed at my job, but it changed dramatically. We moved apartments, and many of our close friends moved away. We had a baby. We kept comforting ourselves with this “year of transition” business when the upheaval felt like too much, promising ourselves that a new homeostasis would somehow arrive with a new calendar year.

I’m not sure when in 2018 that we looked up at each other and said, “Is this just adulthood? A constant transition from one thing to the next?”

I read a book this summer that was illuminating for me in a lot of ways. In the early chapters, I wasn’t even sure I would stick with it. By the end, I had goosebumps and was tearing up at the end of every chapter.

Maybe You Should Talk to Someone is a memoir of sorts. The author is a therapist, and a personal upheaval in her own life prompts her to seek therapy for herself. The book interweaves her story with the stories of several of her clients, and its central question is: how do people change? Relevant to our discussion here, I’d say.

In one of her sessions with her therapist, he says: “the nature of life is change, and the nature of people is to resist change.”

This little quote gave me so much comfort while simultaneously exploding this neat little story Mike and I had been telling ourselves about “transition.” We’d been naively imagining change in a time bound box, a state that would eventually leave us alone.

There are changes we set out to make- the new exercise routine, the daily prayer practice, the drastic haircut. As someone who thrives on these kind of changes and resists even the most minor of changes not of my making, I wonder if we make the changes we can to stave off the ones we can’t control. In the last episode, Dream, I mentioned that my big dreams are often the mechanism I think will make me feel how I want to feel.

Similarly, the changes we choose are about how we want to feel, and how we don’t. We want to feel capable, confident, strong, loved, and successful. Maybe we seek a career change, a hair color, a yoga class to get there. On the flip side, we don’t want to feel out of control, unstable, like a victim of circumstance or rejected. Hence our resistance to the unexpected job loss, errant gray hair, canceled yoga class.

It seems that our relationship with change is a complicated one: we crave it, and we resist it. We fear it to the point of denial at times, and we feel desperate for it at others. One year a cascade of change gives us whiplash; another, we feel stuck, afraid nothing will ever change.

We feel unmoored by change, and electrified by it. We orchestrate it, and we feel blindsided by it. We lament it in other people, when we feel left behind or rejected in the wake of their transformations. And, we wring our hands over unhealthy family scripts, toxic tendencies, and addictive compulsions that play out the same, every time. We wait a long time to admit it, even to ourselves, when marble solid beliefs have slowly been carved into a different shape.

If you’re listening to this in real time, we’re on the edge of a change of seasons. There’s something about this particular shift, from summer to fall, that lends itself to fresh starts. Wallace Stegner puts it well, in this quote from Angle in Repose:

“That old September feeling, left over from school days, of summer passing, vacation nearly done, obligations gathering, books and football in the air ... Another fall, another turned page: there was something of jubilee in that annual autumnal beginning, as if last year's mistakes had been wiped clean by summer.”

I hope you find yourself at the beginning of some welcome change this almost-fall day. Listen to the episode for a poem and benediction on this theme!

As always, I’d also love to hear your thoughts on anything this episode calls to mind for you. Connect with me on Instagram or email me ([e-mail]) to let me know!

Gratefully, Jacey

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