Making Change

I can't make up my mind.

(You don't sound shocked.)

I won't waste your time with lots of Carrie Bradshaw set-up, where the reader must withstand six minutes of bad fashion/boobs/latte intros before getting to the meaty question of the episode (e.g., So his constant clinginess had me and the girls wondering, are our hours really ours?)

Crickets.

I'm struggling with the concept of change. I know that things change. I have a patch of grey hair that five years ago didn't peek out from underneath my combover. The leaves collecting along street curbs tell me another season is walking in the door.

But do people change? Not can they, as in babies can be born with two heads, one can change her eating habits and actually keep obesity at bay until after the ten-year reunion. But do they? Does long-term change actually happen in the real people of the real world?

I used to be a student of the affirmative response. My very training is in the science of behavior change. You don't have to suffer from depression forever. You can replace these unhealthy behaviors with more adaptive ones. I have known people who have freed themselves from dependence on a multitude of substances, and after dozens of years they haven't gone back. I've heard rumors of high school mean girls who seem to have softened considerably when ten years out they marry the nice boys of your graduating class. We all have known an octogenarian who no longer uses racial slurs at the Thanksgiving dinner table, a mother who makes efforts to listen to a child's explanation before handing down a punishment, or a spouse who finally recognizes that the constant ribbing isn't quite as funny when you're on the receiving end.

But you know what? In my limited experience, behavior change doesn't follow the plotline of a Nanny 911 episode and eventually, you can almost bet on people sliding. That is, more often than not, we just are who we are. By adulthood we are conditioned and wired to do things in a certain way, to see our world accordingly, and to treat others in a relatively predictable pattern. I have witnessed relationships on the verge of collapse move into safe territory for months under the promise and even the achievement of change, only to disintegrate when it became obvious that the walls were just too heavy for two people to prop up. Try changing a social bias in a friend that they've clearly assumed since childhood. Or taking the thing you wish you could change most about yourself, not your hair color or your dress size, but that catty but extremely fulfilling way in which you gossip with hate, you just knowing that anything he says is bound to be dumb, or better yet, your unforgiving relationship with your mother.

Think you could successfully take on more than one? Even one?

And in my mind, this doesn't just apply to positive movement. Binges and phases are exactly that: a close girlfriend who showers time and investment on a new friendship eventually comes back to tend to yours. I swung into months of neglecting myself and others, but this extreme state did not last for long; my pendulum eventually swung back toward normalcy and the core person I know myself to be. I have a friend who recently plunged into the darkside of insensitivity and living inside a complete bubble of his own selfishness. My belief is that in time he too will regress to his own mean and will return to being a friend who considered the feelings of others often before his own. Then again, maybe this latter state is who this man really is.

Whichever your take on it, what saddens and strikes me is just how pessimistic my viewpoint on change actually is. How it assumes in many cases that we are ultimately powerless.

And just how unlike the true me I know that to be.