My anxiety around change has a strange component that, while amorphous and emotional and thus hard to describe, feels something like a fear of disappearing. Here, there is an obvious kinship to the typical fears of death and annihilation, but wherein those ideas are anchored in the disintegration of self this angst is less about one's own perception and more about the expectations of others. After all, internally, the thread of self is well-practiced in accepting and even making sense of one's evolution and the contradictions that it propagates; one always sees oneself, even if at moments this image is obscured. On the other hand, in the eyes of others we are static beings, archetypes on which they hang their love or their disdain. Furthermore, this perception is rarely simple or articulated in such a way that we can respond with honest vigor to the errors implicit in their confidence.
The vague outline of who we are in others eyes reduces our mobility and our momentum of being. Uncertain as to what digression might disrupt the (actual or perceived) fragility of other people's vision of us, we act in restrictive steps that fail to move us forward and only calcify their misguided notions of "who we are". We hold nothing so sacred as the religion we want to believe. And we want to believe we are our mother's idea of son, our lover's idea of husband, our child's idea of father. We want to be that which is desired of us even in our uncertainty as to what that is.
But the dilemma does not end there. With failure assured by the dissonance that exists between another's ideal and human actuality, we find it necessary to adapt. In response, we compartmentalize selves and show only the parts that support a comforting consistency for those around us. Both sides are culpable, complicit in the lie. And if this is not outright deception, it certainly contains the seeds of duplicity that when discovered will take the material isolation of body from body, mind from mind, and create a chasm that will bleed. In short, a bright light ignites an atom bomb; blinded, unable to see the being that they have created, we disappear.
This process is present in a myriad of life's transitions: divorce, diagnosis, death all in an elementary way are the confrontation of idea with flesh. Why is the human mind attached to irrational templates of perfection? What in our inclinations prefers disappointment to reality, false stasis to change? Again, the irony in this is that we live in the fluid stew of our own consciousness; we see change, accept change, even celebrate change in ourselves moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day. It feels right and natural. Yet, we--like the people around us who's expectations so painfully define us--want a world of permanence, a reliable firmament inhabited by familiar beings. Perhaps it is this artificial security that affords us the luxury of making room for the storm we experience inside.
