A Lot Can Change In a Year
It's 8pm on Saturday night and I've got nothing. Usually earlier in the week, I'll have a Sunday Starter already written that I'll schedule out ahead of time. If that doesn't happen then Saturday morning I'll go through the dozens of half-finished posts I have written on OneNote pages and try to see if there's something worth finishing. Most weeks, it goes pretty fast. I take an old topic, clean it up, and I'm done. Today… not so much. I mean with topics like Burnt Hair, Back to the Future Inventions, and Crapper, I can't imagine why I had a hard time getting something solid written for you all but after 30 minutes when my page was still blank, Andrew suggested going back to an old Sunday Starter: Is there something you've written on in the past that you feel differently about now?
Cue the laugher.
Of course there is. As a writer, one of the worst things is putting opinions out into the world - in a somewhat permanent fashion - knowing full and well that something might happen that changes that opinion. On my website there is the Kristen that exists on July 2, 2023. While I think she's pretty great, you know who's also there? Kristen from March 22, 2019. That Kristen, she was still pretty great, but in many ways profoundly different. And I mean, can you blame me? Think about what has happened since March 2019…. You know what? I don't even have to go back that far, just looking at last July is enough.
A year ago today, I had just been unexpectedly laid off from my job and Roe v Wade had just been overturned. The week we spent with my family to celebrate the Fourth of July was filled with political conversations and grieving over not just my job, but things in this world that I took for granted. (See my post, July 1, 2022: The Truth About Grief). For all of us, our views of the world and the things in it will be shifting as we grow, and even more so when we go through life-altering events; there are times when the world we live in is suddenly ripped out from under us resulting in a deep change in perspective.
In Glennon Doyle's Untamed she spoke about one of her earlier books which was all about her loving marriage with her husband. In the month she was meant to promote it, she found out that he was cheating on her. This meant she was about to talk up several hundred pages of content that she no longer agreed with. When I read this, during the same month when so much for me was changing, I immediately added a page to my OneNote titled writer. I jotted a few sentences down about how difficult it is to have a version of yourself captured only to have everything change.
Now looking back on it, I know that it's not just writers, it's all of us. We have people in our lives that will keep remembering us as that person we were years ago; they will keep seeing us through the lens of the past, as opposed to who we are now. When this happens it can be discouraging, but remember that while we can’t change who we were then, we can be proud of the present and stay open to any learning and changing that will get us to our best future.
