The Sexy Change Myth
Why change is actually a terrifying sh*t-show - and you should do it anyway
Many years ago, I worked in a senior communications role for a major listed company. I wore tight dresses and heels (imagine!) and sat in meetings with important people who cared desperately about things like “circling back”, “efficacy” and “touching base”. The company was going through a ‘challenging time’ (corporate speak for ‘losing money like a drunk teenager on holiday’) and part of my job was to help communicate this to the 40,000 or so people who worked there.
The powers that be made some changes to the strategy (corporate speak for ‘stuff that the company is going to do’) and made a bunch of people redundant (corporate speak for ‘firing people with some additional pay’). The people who kept their jobs were understandably left freaked out by the threat of losing their ability to pay for mortgages and school fees, and confused by the changes in strategy. They were also stressed and sad - they were left picking up additional work and missing their mates. So they were not performing at their best.
As a result, the ‘challenging times’* (*’oh holy fuck we’re losing EVEN MORE money’) continued, and the powers that be decided more jobs needed to go to mitigate the problem. Then they hired in a bunch of consultants who trotted out pseudo-psychology about the ‘change curve’ (fancy speak for ‘it takes people a while to get used to something different’) and the importance of ‘resilience’, charged a fortune for some PowerPoint slides and buggered off. If, like me, the word resilience makes you want to vomit into your own shoes, you might enjoy my thoughts here.
The powers that be grew frustrated that their people were behaving like humans and not just being good and getting on with things like they’d envisaged with the new strategy. And a new phrase started to be bandied around these important meetings:
“Change is the new normal!”.
I was told to communicate this and explain that enough was enough and people really just needed to “deal” now. Instead, I keeled over from my own 5 new jobs, and treated myself to a little suicidal depression at home with my folks. But that’s another story.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Since then I’ve been making endless changes in my life in an effort to create something that works a little better for me. I got divorced, I re-trained in my career, I moved out of the city, I got a dog, I changed my friends, I nearly joined a sex cult… you name it, I did it. For me, my friends, change truly is the new normal.
And I’m here to tell you something that’s won’t win me many friends or, for that matter, paid work; change sucks ass.
Change is the absolute worst. Change is like being woken up in the middle of the night from some particularly tasty dream, being yanked from your warm cosy bed and told to run up a mountain, naked in the driving rain. Even when you choose the change, it still feels like a punch in the privates. Remember how excited you were to move house, then went through the horror of the logistics of actually moving? Yeah. That. That feeling of nausea and panic right there - that’s what change feels like.
That’s not to say we should avoid change. Absolutely not - change is necessary and good for us. Change can be an exciting catalyst transporting us to new worlds and new ways of being. Change tests our boundaries and proves to us we can do more than we thought. Change is the point where we grow – when we discover what we’re capable of. Even the shit changes tend to teach us something. I would never have chosen to get divorced – but the strength it gave me and thew new life I reveald I could change for the world.
But the process… the actual nuts and bolts mess of going through a change. That’s about as much fun as having a wisdom tooth removed (something I have coming up in a couple of week’s time - I am no pro this change).
The change fantasy
The problem is we live in a world that seems to increasingly fetishise and simplify change stories. And as a result our expectations and understanding of change is getting a bit screwy. Social media is full of it.
“I quit my job and made a six figure salary selling hats to giraffes!” “Why are you still at your desk when you could be working from a treehouse co-working space run by raccoons in Mexico, you moron?” “I read a book on money management when I lived under a bridge living off fermented rat, and now I own my dream home in Barbados!”
We love these stories - of course we do. Transformation is the very essence of what a story is. The hero’s journey; a person who faces a challenge that shifts them out of their every day life and on a quest to overcome it. They emerge the other side enlightened. Or, in the case of Disney, married to a handsome prince. The murder is solved, boy gets girl, wrongs are righted, justice is done. Everyone lives happily ever after - then brings out their own lucrative line of swimwear.
There is something not only seductive about this, but visceral. Storytelling is built into our DNA. We love stories - and the tale of transforming your life and thriving in the face of adversity is the purest one there is. They are such stuff as dreams are made on. When people talk about their dramatic life change - quitting the corporate world, following their passion, using their redundancy money to start an elk farm - we lap it up. There’s a reason for the uptick in speaking opportunities for successful change artists.
These stories sell - you’ll find them in newspapers, magazines and all over social media algorithms. They give us hope. As you crawl back to your miserable job on a grey January day, the idea that you could just jack this all in is more alluring than ever. Combine this with new year’s resolutions, “new year, new me!” bollocks, and you’ve got a powerful cocktail of wishful thinking. You’re one more tedious conversation about your weekend away from pushing back your chair, throwing down your notebook and shouting “I QUIT!” at your boss.
Frankly I’m all in favour of this. You do you, babe. But let’s just take a moment to acknowledge that the next step of this journey ain’t gonna be pretty.
The messy middle
The thing we tend to overlook and underestimate is the terrifyingly messy midsection that gets left out of most stories.
Stories, after all, only work when they have an ending. I’ve been reading English comedian Jimmy Carr’s book Before & Laughter recently - which is, frankly, brilliant. Part memoir, part self-help and part no-holds-barred irreverent comedy jaunt, it’s how I think all self-help should be written. Comedy lands points so much better than sincerity. See court jesters.
Jimmy is passionate about people doing what they want with their lives. He began his career on the graduate trainee scheme at Shell - and made decent money doing the corporate thing. But he realised it wasn’t for him, discovered stand-up, took voluntary redundancy and became one of the UK’s best known comedians and television presenters. It’s a cracking story - and it works because a) what he’s saying is right (a life not doing what you love is a life wasted), and b) because it so obviously and demonstrably paid off and was the right thing to do. Shell’s loss is the world’s gain. Because we only hear the stories of the people who it worked out for. Nobody wants to hear about Dennis who quit his job as a chef to become a gardener and then went back to… being a chef.
The truth is that the reality of making a big change is fucking terrifying - and anyone who tells you otherwise is either a sociopath or lying.
Change isn’t sexy. It’s not quitting your job and moving into a luxury beach-side hut. It’s not manifesting a shitload of cash and it suddenly arriving.
It’s walking around with your hair on fire, trying to smile and act natural when you feel you’re on a tightrope over a pit of pirahanas. It’s a constant knot of anxiety worrying that you’ve made a terrible mistake and wanting to run like a lover returning from the war into the warm embrace of your old life. It’s constantly comparing yourself to the apparent success of the people who continued doing what you were doing, instead of deliberately lighting a fuse on your life. It’s smiling gratefully when people tell you how brave you are, when the reality is you want to hide under a duvet and never come out.
It’s living with constant terror that it might not work out. Because you know what? It might not. That’s the reality of life.
Feel the fear and set fire to your hair anyway
This is all to say that if you’re making a big change and you feel more like a quivering wreck than a conquering hero, it means you’re doing it right. Don’t let the Insta heroes and authors fool you - they went through this too. It’s just a neater story to ignore the messy bits.
I am just as guilty of romanticising my life changes as the next person. When you reach middle age, chances are you’ve been through some shit – and I’ve done my fair share. Mental health breakdown, bereavement, divorce tick tick tick. And of course I’m going to tell you that they have all informed and improved my life in some way. We’re wired to do this. Creating a narrative makes us feel safe and in control. We can tell ourselves something happened for a reason. And I also happen to believe it’s true.
And that’s the great thing about us. No matter what happens, if your change doesn’t yield the result you were after, your brain will re-calibrate it to make whatever happened meaningful. We survive because we adapt - and adapting makes us stronger than staying comfortable.
So make that change. Embrace it as the new normal. Quit the job, take the money, eat the cake, move to Mexico. Just remember the road to your perfect life is dark, full of potholes and badly signed. It’s not wrong but it’s really going to fuck up your car’s suspension for a bit. And that’s ok.
Hola amigos! I’ve been feeling the pressure this week as last week’s post seemed to really resonate with a lot of you. Which obviously left me both grateful, delighted and crippled with anxiety about what to write this week. Are you making any new year changes? Is your life one big change? Are you mainly terrified or floating swan-like through it all? Do you think change needs an image makeover? I’d love to hear your thoughts…
Also massive hi to new subscribers! Lovely to have you here - pull up a comfy chair and enjoy.
You've somehow managed to lead me by my shaky, petrified hand down the memory lane of repeated failures, but laughing all the way! Brilliant article, Annie, as always. This one is particularly poignant to me as someone who's left the warm embrace of comparatively excellent, albeit unsatisfying, jobs in the financial industry for the fiery torture of burning hair, cemented smiles and pirranha pits... twice! Admittedly, the first time I did it, I had a VERY clear pathway to success: quit my job, become rich. Simples!
Alas, the reality was significantly more harrowing, and devastating, for any individual to take, let alone his young family.
Then, a decade later (4 years ago, almost to the day) and with a fully recovered confidence and infinitely more humbled expectations, I did it again. I'll let you know someday if it was the right call..
My point is that the torturous rollercoaster of entrepreneurship I twice decided to jump on is one I would enthusiastically encourage anyone with the confidence to control their sphincter to take, because if you can resist the urge to shit yourself, you will certainly learn from, and dare i say enjoy, the ride.... someday.
You describe very well your "midlife mess" and the changes get messier as one progresses into the next stage of life. I am in my late 70's and much of my life changes now involve aging and health issues. There is a Little Feat song, 'Old Folks Boogie', with a line: "You know you're over the hill when your mind makes a promise that your body can't fulfill." This happens all too frequently for me now.
I will share one bit of my old folk wisdom - being good at change is not a conscious mind thing, but a deep trust in one's subconscious knowledge. Cultivating a deep sense of oneself is vital in getting a sense of the part of you that is unchanging in the maelstrom of inevitable change life (and death) demands. Buddhism works for me in guiding me to release the tendency to hold on to expectations which increases the suffering and the terror you describe.