Change......or Whatever.

In the past year or so, I’ve begun to notice a pattern emerging in old friends of mine. As my childhood/college friends creep into their mid and late 20s, many of them seem to be morphing into their parents. They’ve begun to adhere to old values they had rejected or openly rebelled against in their teens and early 20s. They’ve even adopted the personality traits of their parents. In many cases, it’s a good change: the slob who suddenly began to keep a clean house, like the one he grew up in: but I’ve also seen some bad changes: a formerly forward-thinking student reverting to his parents’ racism, a once level-headed thinker suddenly adopting her father’s bull-headed, arrogant, shout-you-down argument method she had so long despised.

The phenomenon has been swift and jarring in most of the cases I’ve witnessed, and I have to say that I’m utterly fascinated by it. We’re all aware of the teenaged rebellion phase, and that it’s only temporary for most of us. But to see such dramatic swings in behaviour so quickly is very unsettling. Did my friends just spend the past decade in the throes of adolescent hormones? Was every step they took away from their parents a farce? It almost seems as if they were destined to become little clones of their families, returning to old traditions and beliefs like salmons swimming back to their spawning creek.

I have a small theory as to why these more dramatic shifts in thought and behaviour might happen to us so suddenly. Granted, it’s only a theory, but I think it has some validity. From the day we are enrolled in kindergarten, most of us have a single purpose for the next 12 years: Go through school. Learn. Take tests. Get good grades. Graduate high school. Then, for the next four, we have another: Go to college. Learn. Take tests. Get good grades. Get a degree. But after that, the plans for our future get fuzzy. Suddenly, we can make more choices. We choose whether we want to pursue a career, a job to get by, a spouse/family, or all or none of these things. There are no teachers telling us when it’s time for recess, no academic advisors mapping out the next four months of our lives, and most of the time, our parents have backed off on telling us how to live our lives. For the first time in our lives, our fate is entirely in our hands. And it is absolutely terrifying.

Famous psychologist Dr. Virginia Satir once said, “Most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” In The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, neuropsychologist Dr. Bruce Perry confirms this theory by presenting cases of neglected and traumatized children whom, once in a safe environment, begin to lash out and attempt to “provoke” their caretakers into behaving the way they are accustomed to adults behaving (normally violently.) It is a well-documented trait of many traumatized individuals to provoke this way. It is their chaos-conditioned brains to “take control” of their situation.

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I believe this is what might be happening, on a far less violent or traumatic level, when my friends begin to revert back to the values, beliefs, and behaviours of their upbringings. Life’s once clear path has become hazy. There are too many choices, too many opportunities for failure. Things like marriage and career don’t seem to be happening at the time we thought they should be. Friends on Facebook seem to be right on track, but we’re still floundering, still questioning what we want to do with our lives, and we seem to be stuck in purgatory. We look at our families, at our parents. They seem so much more grounded than we are right now. Their lives seem secure. So, perhaps so many of us revert back to the way we were raised simply because human beings find so much comfort in certainty. We take comfort in ritual, even if those rituals are backwards or pointless (look at religion). It’s comforting to think that there is a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ way of living, in believing that the world is more black and white than it actually is. Uncertainty is frightening. Certainty, even false certainty, can dissolve that fear.

Now, I’m only positing this theory for extreme, sudden reversions. All of us become our parents in some way, shape or form. No one can escape every imprint left on them by their pasts. I, for example, have adopted my mother’s habit of coaching family/friends/passersby/strangers on the street in exactly what to say in any given situation. I hated this trait growing up, and I cringe every time I hear myself say, “Look, just go up to your professor, and say ‘I know it was wrong of me to blow up in class, but that other student was way out of line!’.” as if the person I’m talking to is a small child who cannot handle their own situation. Our upbringing will always emerge in some form. But in the extreme cases, I honestly think that reversions are made more from fear than habit.

In my personal situation, I have two very separate categories of friends: The ones who are my age or a bit older, and the ones whom I often (while sounding unintentionally condescending) call my babies. My friends who are my age and older are moving forward in their careers, getting married, having children, getting divorced, buying houses, and other big life things. My babies, who are 23 and under, are still experiencing or just coming down from that nearly 20-year education track, where life is still mapped out. They are idealistic, ambitious, loud, and naïve. I love each and every one of my beautiful younglings. I love them like I love snowflakes. They are so beautiful that they aren’t real. Their idealism, their certainty of the world, has only a moment before it strikes a warm surface and melts away. The road ahead, which seemed so clear, branch off into countless forks; so many different paths that they won’t even be able to comprehend the number. The black and white world will become so gray that my babies won’t know up from down. Some will see this new world, and all its countless paths, as endless opportunities, but others, like many of my friends, and like me, will be terrified. They will torment themselves with questions like, What am I supposed to be doing? Where should I be in life right now? Why isn’t anything happening for me? And when that fear strikes, when that crippling uncertainty refuses to break, many of my younglings will revert to the way they were raised, back into the comfort of predictability. Others will run, like I tried to when I first experienced all of this: Move to a new city, start fresh. Some will decide that more education is the answer; grad school, night classes, a new certification, a second degree.

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None of these paths are right or wrong, but no matter what path you take, whether you move to a new city or morph into a clone of your mother, you will change. And you won’t stop changing. I moved to Columbus and came back to BG a very changed person. But I’ve changed just as much in this past year. The human condition is never truly stagnant. We constantly evolve as life throws inevitable wrenches in our plans. The uncertainty can be terrifying, but rather than revert back to behaviours or beliefs that you once railed against, I suggest an alternate path: actively observe change, and take as much charge of it as you can.

To use myself as an example: I mentioned that I’ve changed a lot in this past year. I’ve noticed that I no longer have the insatiable desire to leap into a debate, or even discussion, about tumultuous topics. I still do, and I still have my venomous tongue, but as Facebook’s Trending app regurgitated events and issues onto my wall, I began to notice a heaviness in my chest; a gnawing dread that eventually grew into exhaustion. I realized that I was changing; learning about Congress’s decision that corporations can have religious beliefs, or that the minimum wage debate was in full swing, or that Donald Trump was running for president, began to stress me out far more than invigorate me to speak out. After realizing this change in myself, I took charge. I’ve begun to limit my Facebook intake and ask for friends’ opinions on a subject and read responses without replying, rather than just blurt out my opinion and charge into a debate. I’ve also made the difficult decision to unfriend or unfollow people I love in person, but whose Facebook feeds are full of ignorance, hatred, and prejudice. It’s a slow process, but I’ve begun to feel that gnawing dread fade, and I know I’ll be better off for it.

A less trite example (“Facebook, Dee, really? Who cares?”) is that I’ve begun to stop avoiding the little jabs of guilt I’ve had all my life about the animal products that I eat. I’ve had a deep love of animals my entire life, and if I’m being completely honest with myself, I’ve never been 100% okay with animals suffering and/or dying for my personal consumption. After doing a little more research (what are the facts of treatment of animals for meat, and what is propaganda, etc), I have come to the conclusion that I’m not comfortable with the death of an animal for me to eat, whether or not they were treated humanely before their slaughter. I’m not okay with the way chickens are treated for mass egg production, either (a subject that is hard to find empirical evidence for, so I am erring on the side of caution.) It took some time, but I’ve decided that I’m going to very gradually make my diet more ethical, and, probably a few years from now, phase meat out of my diet, if not completely, than mostly.*I’ve already started doing this in tiny baby steps, and honestly, it already feels good. I bought two dozen eggs off of a friend who raises chickens, and I felt an unexpected and bizarre sense of exhilaration—I am consuming a product and no animals were harmed or mistreated in order for me to consume them. It feels great. And farm fresh eggs are so delicious, it’s ridiculous. Seriously.

Anyway, to bring this strange, diary-like post to a close; change is terrifying and inevitable. It comes from the outside and we have very little control over when it comes, how it comes, or what is coming. It comes from within without any prompting at all, not just from big changes we make to ourselves. Rather than revert back to old comforts that may not be the best path in the end, I recommend taking control as much as possible, figuring out the person you want to be, or the changes you want to happen, and make active decisions to gravitate toward that path.

…end pointless rant.

*Before any of my meat-loving friends get up in arms about this, I’m going to reassure you that this is a personal ethical choice, that I’m not going to run through the streets screaming “MEAT IS MURDER!” This is a completely individual choice for me, and I won’t hold anyone else to that choice, even my future children. I will take the ethical hit and still purchase and prepare meat for my family (and, more presently, my boyfriend and friends), but eventually I would like to at least purchase meat directly from local farms, or local butchers, so I have a better idea of how the slaughtered animals were treated. So calm your tits.