As we get older we tend to deal less well with change. We don’t like it. Unfortunately, at this stage of life, changes are all too frequently thrust upon us by forces we are unable to resist.
But I tend to see myself as someone who has never liked change – very much a status quo kind of person, even when I was younger. Thinking about this topic for today, I am forced to wonder why I see myself that way. I left home and went away to college, I emigrated to another country, I got married and then divorced. Finally, I completely changed my vision of myself by accepting and then embracing my lesbianism, embarking upon a lifetime commitment, and eventually marriage, to another woman. I have had something like twenty different addresses throughout my life. This does not really sound like someone who resists change.
Perhaps in fact what I did was fail to resist change. I didn’t initiate it. I didn’t own it. I simply went with the flow, falling in with the plans of others. It was not until I came out. morphing into the real me, that I truly began to take responsibility for my own life. Coming out in itself was, of course, my first and greatest resistance. There can be little more challenging than pushing back against your very self, or at least the self you always thought you were.
Ever after that sea change in my mid-forties, I have been much more cognizant of, and proactive about, change. Not all change is good, not all change is bad. Sometimes we resist change, sometimes we resist remaining the same. And, inevitably, we can never all agree on which is which. Change can also be very deceptive. The voters who gave the world both Trump and Brexit, insisted they were voting for change. In fact, they were for the most part resisting change, or perhaps hoping for things to start moving back in time, to return to a former world, which is change of a sort I suppose. Trump supporters want to return to a time of high-wage car factories; a land where coal is king. Brexit supporters hunger for the days when the British invaded other countries, rather than the people of those countries surging into Britain. Britain first. America first. In both countries, there are large segments of the population resisting any kind of positive, forward-moving change.
But it all depends, of course, on what your own vision is of positive change. I feel like I have been resisting, pushing back, against changes I thought to be negative all my life. Though, as I said before, in my earlier life I fear I did very little thinking, and more especially feeling, for myself. At least I can say, in my own defense, that I chose those I followed along with, very wisely. All the protests I took part in then are the same ones I would choose now, now I am the real me. I resisted nuclear missiles both in the UK and later in the US. I protested against the Vietnam war for what feels like forever. I marched for support of AIDS victims for another forever.
Now I am resisting as I have never resisted before. And now it is I who resist change. I resist Trump’s evil changes not only in protest marches but with daily actions; phone calls and e-mails dispatched at a rate I never before dreamed of. Since election day 2016 I feel that I am living some awful nightmare from which, every day, I am ready to wake up. I just hope this particular resistance is not yet another of those forevers.
© March 2017
About the Author
I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.
