Fearing Change

I’m grateful that my family dysfunction felt excruciatingly unbearable. Growing up, it made sense to me that my peers would be more likely to live fulfilling lives because their family dysfunction appeared to be easily withstandable. However, when you feel like you can ignore certain unhealthy dynamics because “it’s not that bad”, you never become a person that feels worthy of healthy dynamics.

Having the knowledge that I was in a terrible place gave me the opportunity to make an early commitment to myself to pursue a life where I get to be in an amazing place. Most of my friends grew up in relatively “okay” places. Dynamics where perhaps they’re able to recognize their parents aren’t perfect, but they can share that with their siblings or they can relate to most of their issues with peers that also lived in “okay” places. They receive a sort of collective validation for their struggles and suddenly every normalized issue appears smaller than it actually is. When I shared stories about my family, I was often met with horrified expressions. No one related to my stories, but they’d try to convince me it was okay anyway.

As children, we want everything to be okay. We have no idea how to regulate ourselves when something is wrong so we teach ourselves to act like nothing is wrong in the best way we can, and that’s how we continue to survive without actually growing. When I turned nineteen, pretending to be okay became impossible. It was clear that I had no way of living a fulfilling future if I didn’t address my past. I began therapy, and life slowly became more tolerable, but healing required years of training my brain to see and do things differently before I could actually make huge changes. I’ve been living in a bubble. Obsessively focused on learning how to be okay instead of pretending and how to regulate when I’m not.

I’m twenty-seven now, and I am finally okay. Clearly life is not fully figured out. I have good days and bad days and countless days when I wonder what the fuck is going on in the world, but I feel like I’m learning how to navigate what I can rather than ignore things I can change. At the moment, it seems like that may be one of the keys to life. Giving all your attention to the things you can change internally and externally, rather than being married to the fear that there’s nothing you can do. When we were kids, there really wasn’t anything we could do but accept our situations and when you’re situation “isn’t that bad”, it’s easy to give up on the idea of change. It begins to feel dangerous to even acknowledge that you want something different and when you’re given the opportunity for it, you reject it.

My peers that grew up in “okay” places are still terrified of change and now they’re terrified of me. I thought my healing journey would allow me to build the healthy relationships I always desired, but it’s pushed more people out of my life than I could have ever imagined. In a way, I’m more connected to them than I’ve ever been because I understand the pain and fear viscerally. But when you’re deathly afraid of the changes you want in life, a person who willingly makes changes whenever they can is dangerous. I am wildly unsafe to the nervous system of the people I love and I never considered that would be something I’d have to learn to cope with.