Acquaintances

I have close to 1.8k friends on Facebook - yet, I don't know half of them anymore. In all honesty, I was going to post a status saying "If you don't care about this status/me, please unfriend me for both our sakes" - then realised that would look sickeningly attention-whorey and just plain, well... weird. Seriously though, I'm not sure what to do with that platform anymore (although that's besides the point of this post). I actually came on here tonight to write about change, and I guess I brought up my friends just then because my 'timeline' and 'friends list' on Facebook have recently had a lot to do with my reflections upon it. 

I was reading this article yesterday on anxiety disorders and the diminished capacity for sufferers of anxiety to react positively to change. Immediately at first, I was like: 'bullshit, I have always been okay at dealing with with change'... yet then it all suddenly fit together. I got little flashes of this blog, and an actual - almost embarrassing - admittance to myself that in the depths of my downs I am hopeless at coping with change. In fact, I avoided it at all costs at one point in my life. I let my fear of change override my basic preservation of my own dignity. On more than a handful of occasions, I let my fear of change make me succumb into a smaller, less courageous version of myself. 

I am never going to be that person who wishes to go back in time and somehow make every bad situation okay. That's not what I want at all - but it is definitely interesting to have a retrospective view of the 'mistakes' you think you made. It's insane to think that i can actually 100% appreciate feeling like an absolute piece of crap 5 years ago if it means that I can feel the way I feel right now. Some days I wake up and I legitimately convince myself that somewhere down the line I woke up a different person, because the way I look at the world feels totally different different. Yet, I know that's not the case. Change doesn't truly cast its impact in revolutions and bounds - it mines away at your life in little increments within every single moment. In that way, I guess, it's super-duper unavoidable - and although that's scary, it's also kind of liberating in the sense that it allows you to accept this: you cannot run away from change, it's happening constantly, and no matter how hard you try, it's going to affect you eventually.

I've felt the pain of letting change run me down; finding it hard to even barely keep up. I know what it's like to look around and have no fucking clue how things got to be a certain way. I still struggle with this run, but I know it's possible. 

So, here's my "i'm-having-a-good-week piece of advice" for the future-me who's struggling to put change into any kind of positive context  - 
Just run with it. Run ahead of it. Steer its path into a direction that makes you feel an internal drive to keep ahead. 

Don't freak out. 
One day in the future, you'll probably 100% appreciate feeling like an absolute piece of crap right this very moment. Sounds like a silly cliche, but you've experienced it, so you know it's true.