Change

I don't like change. It's not that I'm not flexible - I can be flexible and easy going a lot of the time - but there are some areas and circumstances when I seem to have trouble handling things being different than usual. I guess I'm a creature of habit, but it's more than that; it goes deeper than stubbornness. It's difficult to explain but I'll do my best.

I suspect that maybe some of my difficulty with change stems from a difficult move from Tennessee to Massachusetts when I was three. I hid in the closet while the moving men were packing up, but no one is sure if it was because I didn't want ot move or if I was just scared of the moving men. I screamed and cried in the car the whole ride up to Massachusetts with my aunt and uncle who never let me forget it. And just in general I obviously didn't want to move. But that's not what I blame for my resistance to change.

More than any life-changing moves from one state to another is the life-changing experience of being chronically ill, not being able to predict from one day, or even one moment to the next if I will have pain or be able to remain upright. In this area there are constnats - pain, fatigue, nausea, the inability to do "normal" things any other 24-year-old would be concentrating on. But in with these consants are the unpredicitibilities that accompany this life - wondering how a new treatment will affect me, if the pain will be worse or better tomorrow, if things will ever get better or if this is how my life will always be or, worse, if things will deteriorate further leaving me with even more problems.

There can be no planning for the future other than dreams which I cling to as if they were a security blanket. But this security blanket brings with it little real security, just the knowledge that my dreams are my own and no illness can take them away from me if I choose to hold on to them. Some dreams are now impossibilities. Some dreams are not impossibilities. Some are merely unlikely to become realities. And yet others, the new dreams, or old ones changed through the course of illness, can still come true with slow, hard work or a miracle. But that doesn't stop me from dreaming. This wasn't supposed to be about dreams.

When things are so unpredictible from chronic illness, there needs to be some kind of stability. Some constants other than those the illness brings. So being resistant to change becomes a way of staying sane in the midst of insanity and chaos. It's a way of creating a sense of safety when things could change in an instant an dleave you sicker...or worse. I'm not being overly dramatic, I'm being truthful.

So I cling to traditions that I can count on to be the same year in and year out. I get upset when peoiple leave, when places change, when my constants aren't things I can always count on being there. Who knows, maybe this is just how I am, maybe being moved at a young age created this in me, or maybe I can blame it all on being sick for so long. Whatever the reason, I'll cling to my safety nets and hope I don't get swept under by the waves of change.

Yours,
Penguini