On: Change

You are under no obligation to be who you were five minutes ago.

That applies to your personality, your politics, your life. You could spend your entire career in finance and decide tomorrow that you want to be a DJ. Would you be good at it? Would you make the most money? Probably not. But you can do it. Because you are under no obligation to remain the same person you were five minutes ago.

Our lives are a sum of patterns. What we eat, what we say, our daily schedules. And sometimes those patterns get so ingrained in our minds that we forget it is okay to deviate from them. For some people the need for pattern is so strong that it becomes clinical. But for others it is as simple as: I have done it this way my entire life, so why would I change now?

So that is the question I have. Why not change?

Being in a place where you are uncomfortable means being in a place where you are forced to change. That is where growth occurs.

Let me bring it down to a real example. Every single week, for as long as you can remember, you go to the grocery store and buy the same things. You are used to it. You are familiar with it. It takes the guessing out of it. Now imagine the next time you went, you decided to grab something different. Cook something different. And you found a new meal, a new style of food, a food from a new culture, and all of a sudden your entire palette changes. Nothing dramatic happened. You just decided not to default. And that small decision opened a door you did not even know was there.

That is how change usually works. It rarely announces itself. It starts small, and then one day you look up and realize you are not who you were.

Now look at it through the lens of politics. Just because your parents and grandparents always voted one way does not mean that you have to. Just because YOU voted one way does not mean that you have to again. With new evidence, you are allowed to change. And I think people get scared of that. There is something about changing your political mind that feels like a betrayal. Of your family, your community, your past self. But that is not what it is. Updating your beliefs when you encounter new information is not weakness. It is exactly what an honest, thinking person is supposed to do. The alternative is holding a position not because you believe in it, but because you once did. And that is not conviction. That is just stubbornness dressed up as loyalty.

Over the past year I have been in so many situations where I was forced to adapt. Where things did not go as planned. Where I was thrown into uncertainty. Where people I trusted did not show up the way I expected, and situations I had prepared for fell apart in ways I could not have anticipated. And because of those moments my perspective shifted. On a lot of things. On a lot of people. On life itself. It changed, and that was scary. There is a specific kind of discomfort that comes with realizing the version of yourself you have been operating as no longer fits. Like a coat you have worn for years that suddenly feels wrong on your shoulders. You can keep wearing it. A lot of people do. But I chose to put it down.

And I am glad I did.

I am able to look back now and realize I grew because of it. And I can look at the people who stayed in the same places and see that they have not. Same conversations. Same complaints. Same patterns, same reactions, same ceiling. And the hardest part about watching that is that you cannot say anything. You cannot tell someone they are stuck. People do not receive that. They have to feel it themselves, and some people never do. Some people will spend their entire lives orbiting the same version of themselves and call it consistency. And maybe for them it is. But there is a difference between being consistent and being stagnant, and that line is worth knowing.

That is not a judgment. It is just an observation. Growth requires friction. And not everyone is ready to sit in that friction long enough to come out different on the other side. Some people avoid discomfort so well that they have built an entire life designed around never feeling it. And it works, until it does not. Until something forces their hand. Until the world changes around them and they have no idea who they are outside of the version of themselves they never questioned..

Have they changed? Have they grown? If not, why? If so, how?

When you look at your life through this lens, when you force yourself to be uncomfortable, you have the chance to learn something about yourself that you may have never seen before. You find out what you actually believe when the structure around those beliefs is gone. You find out who you actually are when the patterns that defined you are disrupted. And sometimes what you find surprises you. Sometimes it does not. But either way, you are more honest with yourself than you were before.

So where does this leave us? Be willing to accept change. Be willing to see something different. Stay open. And if you are not, maybe ask yourself why.

Talk Soon,

Tyreke