“Same Changes”
The Weepies

“And everyone says this love will change you. Well, I ask, does anything ever stay the same? No, no, no.”

Eight months ago, I moved 1,300 miles away from my home.

I still wonder how I convinced myself to do it. I was never one of those kids who needed so badly to get out of her hometown that she paced the floor at the thought of having to stay there for the rest of her life. I love my home. I love my family. I am rooted there; my identity was developed there and makes sense there.

Leaving the familiar behind for the unknown was a move I wasn’t sure I was ready to make. But I did it. I graduated from college, packed up my car, and made the two-day trek to Florida. And since my first days here, I’ve felt myself changing.

“Every day I want to freeze frame, scrambling my sleep to keep this fragile frame from the wind, from the driving rain. Soon as it begins it begins to change, it’s strange changes.”

Allowing yourself to change is at once entirely brave and entirely terrifying. As you reach out to take a step forward, it is difficult to know if the ground ahead of you is stable. I was fond of the woman I was when I came to Florida. A lot of time, as well as the love of many people, had gone into cultivating that version of myself, and upon graduating from college, it was easy for me to recognize what great strides I made since entering those four years of my life.

However, there were things that needed work, some edges to smooth out. I wasn’t great at standing up for myself, and I was horrible at recognizing and asking for what I needed. But as I began to feel further and further away from the community I left in May, it felt like my identity was slipping away from me, too. As if being physically removed from the things that had affected my personal growth meant that I was no longer connected to them at all.

“Careful and with patience, hold this tender heart. Leave a well of tiny threads with two fingers. Standing in the garden, gathering the dusk, we hold the sun and golden one, and we linger.”

Since then, I’ve asked again and again, “Who am I, in this place?” The answer wasn’t as difficult to discover as I feared it might be.

I soon found that I carry the things that make up my identity with me: my faith, my love for my friends and family, running, an insatiable appetite for community, my love for words, and my 80s dance moves. As I change, as parts of my personality are stretched and scrubbed, I can be certain those things that are foundational to who I am will not be shaken (ok, the 80s dance moves may not be foundational, exactly, but I really love them). And, to be honest, that fact makes submitting to all of the changing much easier. There is beauty in both the lingering and the moving forward, and I am finding that it is possible to do both simultaneously. In the stillness of being present, I am growing.

—Emmi
TWLOHA Staff