Change Is Hard — This Is Why

“All is flux. Nothing stays still.” — Heraclitus

This past week, I went home every day exhausted. I went into a crash course on all the relentless responsibilities I have at my new job as an educator, overseeing the special education process for my school. I’m also starting law school at night on Monday, and both orientation and my training were significant information dumps.

I went home with a headache as well, and I came home with a takeaway I know and possibly everyone else in the world knows: change is hard.

I know and trust that, at least in terms of my career and school, everything is going to be alright. But I worry more about my relationship, personal life, faith, and more. I worry about the part of myself that won’t prioritize my rest or health.

But enough about me — I want to capture a phenomenon we all experience: flux.

This is a flux period for me. And I’ve also had plenty of flux periods, but you might also have had a recent period of flux, too, or might still be going through one. Flux is the transition of a pregnancy or a newborn. It’s moving to a new state. It’s having your life rapidly upended by loss or a sudden change.

The flux period is an acknowledgment that this is a time of transition, and it won’t be new, shiny, and intimidating all at the same time immediately. That isn’t to say everything gets better after flux. It may as well get worse. But the flux period is a transitory and uncomfortable phase that we have to go through to eventually ease and settle into our more stable lives.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus believed that everything was in flux, or everything is always changing to some extent. Plato interpreted this to mean everything passes and nothing stays, but not everyone agrees with this interpretation.

I want to go deeper to explore why these transitions are so uncomfortable and daunting.

We go through them every time. Yet every time we go to a new school, start a new job, move to a new place, or lose someone we love, it never gets easier. It’s like we’re children again, completely vulnerable to the elements and uncertainty.

I think there’s a certain beauty to that transition and uncertainty. I certainly haven’t been the exact same person in every job I worked or every place I lived. We grow, but we also just have to adapt to our surroundings. Maybe people will push back against the fact that we change as people, but rather just acclimate ourselves to our environments.

Flux is a period of feeling out your new environment. Sometimes it’s about feeling out the culture of the new environment. Sometimes it’s about feeling out the politics, or just the place you can have a meal or play with your kids.

The flux period is a time when you question. Above all, you question yourself. You wonder how you got to this particular place, whether you’re an imposter for being in a better job or better school, but also, in a time of loss, where you question your beliefs. When the flux period is a time of grief, you question your values.

During late-2018 to mid-2019, when I was going through a time of significant loss and grief, I questioned God every day — why is this happening to me? Is it normal to suffer this much? How am I going to get the strength to survive and get through this?

That whole period of time was a flux period because I would say I never adapted and never adjusted. But it did prepare me for life feeling extremely easy once that period of time was over, when I left the environment that triggered so many of those feelings.

Maybe we are always in flux. Maybe we are always changing. But there are major transitions in life and minor transitions. Minor transitions happen every day. Major transitions, like moving, starting a new job, losing a job, having a child, and losing someone you love, come with significant uncertainty and pain.

I hope I’m capturing the flux feeling of feeling so small in the world, like everything you did and learned before this moment is suddenly worthless. That’s how I feel in law school, where I’ll read a chapter of a textbook and realize I didn’t comprehend a single thing. That’s how I felt during my period of grief, where my sense of self and identity came shattering down as I had to find a new identity.

Major changes are so unbelievably hard. We’re human beings and like certainty and unpredictability, but it’s so hard when the future seems so uncertain. It can seem exciting too. But it will always be uncomfortable.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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