Fluidity and Change
words by faith wershba
illustration by yoon-ji kweon
When I was two, I had a green fleece onesie that I wore non-stop. It practically became part of my body, blurring the boundary between where I ended and where the harsh, outer world began. My mom tells me that she had to wait until I was asleep to take it off of me so that she could put it in the laundry. So, it seems I never was particularly good with change.
For the past 20 years, home has been the brick-red house tucked inside a sleepy suburb outside New York City. My bedroom is the bedroom I slept in when I was three years old; I still have hazy memories of how the shadows danced across the walls as my mom told me bedtime stories. My life has been marked by familiarity, and I’ve grown to find comfort in predictability. Sure, I find exhilaration in surprises every now and then. But change—especially looming, anticipated change—creates a subsuming smog of anxiety. It fills my mind with nightmarish ‘what if’ scenarios and winds my heart up like a metronome. The greater the change, the greater the fear: joining a new club? Perhaps a smidge of social anxiety, but nothing I can’t handle. Graduating university and entering into the vast, unknown, chaotic adult world? Heart-shakingly terrifying.
I used to think I knew what I wanted in life. I was a science kid, someone who was on track to pursue a career in research. I repeated this narrative to myself over and over, committing to a version of myself that I was convinced was the ‘right’ one. Never mind that I had questions about the scientific process beyond biochemical mechanisms. Never mind that I found working in the lab kind of miserable most days. Never mind that I loved my philosophy of science courses much more than I did organic chemistry. I would not allow myself to stray from the path I had envisioned: I am someone who follows through, I told myself.
I am now in my fourth and final year of university. I am still studying life science, and I’m on track to receive degrees in Human Biology and Immunology. To be clear, I don’t regret my choice of study; I have genuinely loved my courses, and they have expanded my thinking in ways I could not have predicted. Yet I now face a set of questions. What next? Where do I see myself? What is the ‘right’ decision? In pondering such questions, I realised that each one is actually broken down into a set of choices: Do I follow my curiosities, pursuing what I truly love? Or do I follow the path that I set out for myself, the one that I think I should?
I know that my interests have changed over the past four years; I can’t deny that. My brain lights up by talking about epistemology and research structure, not epistasis and cellular structure. Yet I feel a sense of shame in admitting such changes, as though my dispassion for scientific details demonstrates something fundamentally wrong with me. Why don’t I feel passionate about this? Where has my intellectual drive gone? Am I just lazy? And then comes the dreaded ‘what if’ spiral: What if you can’t find a job? What if you can’t make it in the adult world? What if you can’t handle change?
Oftentimes, change still feels like someone is trying to peel me out of my onesie, stripping me of its comfort and familiarity. Change feels like being exposed to a blizzard completely naked, the wind chiselling me into sharp, fragmented pieces until I’m nothing but a shrivelled core. It feels like a bar of soap slipping through my fingers in the shower, tangible yet elusive, tumbling downward towards the drain. Change feels hard.
I’ve been brushing up against these feelings lately: a sense of tension as I try to cling to the ever-shifting present, while change looms large in the periphery. I am all too aware of the temporality of my current situation, cognisant that I’m on the precipice of another stage of life. It feels like I’m on the edge of a canyon, trying to muster up the courage to leap across the chasm and reach the other side. Point A to point B, with only darkness in between.
Perhaps this conception of change is what’s holding me back. Change happens in the small moments; it is made up of infinitesimal, fluid, continuous transitions. It is not some binary between ‘then and ‘now.’ There is no ‘four years ago self” versus ‘present self.’ There is just me. Learning, growing, changing, evolving.
Change is part of life. Life exists in dynamic equilibrium, a constant flux of actions and reactions that maintain universal balance. We are adaptive, resilient beings, responding to the vagaries of our unpredictable existences. The earth is always spinning, and things are ever-shifting. At the microcosmic level, such shifts may feel like disturbances, disruptions. But if I can zoom out and consider the greater picture, I might just find an intricately balanced sea of experiences, ebbing and flowing as they gently guide me toward where I’m meant to go.
