All right, let's start talking about the process of change.
I was talking with my dear friend Coit a couple of weeks ago, and I was saying how interesting it is that miserable people will choose to just stay miserable. I said, "If things aren't working in your life, why not change them?"
"I think people just don't know how to change," Coit said.
I can teach them, I thought. And I can.
Except.
I'm a pretty big believer that if you're going to try to teach something like that--something that relies on someone choosing to change their energy on a pretty profound level--you better be doing the fucking work yourself. You better be living that process. If you aren't, the universe will know, and it will send you people who only want to pay lip service to change, and together you will make big promises and not deliver, and together you and they will only get more stuck. And we need better than that, because things are pretty fucked up right now, and we need some genuine dedication to positive change.
Contrary to what I said to Coit, change is fucking hard, man. I have no idea how many times I've written and shared this idea here on Free Refills, but it bears repeating: the fundamental fear of change is that in changing, you might die. This place where you are? No matter how miserable you are, no matter how stuck you are in that misery, you know you can survive here. That you are currently alive is the proof. If you've never been happy, if you've never fully thrived, how do you know you'll survive? Perhaps happy will kill you. What proof otherwise do you have?
I've been profoundly committed to change for the last three-and-a-half years. I've been doing the work. And yet I am nowhere near done. Huge amounts of work remain. One measure of that work-to-be-done is how many goddamn Refills I've written about how my publishing practice isn't quite working. If that's the case, why not change it? Because I know it here. It's safe here, in a frustrated, attenuated sense of "safe." What if changing it kills me?
Well guess what process I'll be writing about a lot over the next few weeks.