“You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.” – Richard Feynman

You can’t know everything about yourself from the beginning.

Sometimes we treat decisions as finite things. Once you’ve thought about something for a while, weighed your options, and decided, you have to follow through with that decision. Otherwise, you’re just someone who doesn’t know what they want.

I find that it’s not that I don’t know what I want, but that what I want changes quite often. I get bored easily. I can’t sleep, and so I think. Or possibly I can’t stop thinking and so I can’t sleep, but that’s a topic for another day.

When I first moved to Los Angeles back in 2007, I told all of my friends and family in Minnesota that I would never leave. I loved Southern California, I loved Los Angeles, and I had found my permanent home. And it was true. I absolutely believed that at the time. But you can’t know everything about yourself from the beginning. After 5 years, I was ready to start looking elsewhere and I got a lot of questions from friends, but especially my family.

“But I thought you said you never wanted to leave?”

“What about everything you said to me a year ago?”

It’s almost like people don’t want you to change your mind once you’ve decided. Like somehow, wanting to try on a new place, a new face, a new personality is a bad thing. People get used to one version of you, and whether or not they love that version of you, it’s familiar. 

Have you ever broken up with someone only to have them say, “But you said you loved me?” I have. I find it hard to explain to them that I did love them and that I absolutely meant it when I said it and wasn’t lying. Because that’s what people assume when you change your mind, isn’t it?

You were either lying to yourself or lying to them. Or maybe both. Maybe you’re doing one of those things now.

When did change get so associated with dishonesty? As far as I’m concerned, life is change. If I’m not changing, I’m stagnating. It’s not simply that I’m staying the same or not progressing, I actually feel like I’m suffocating. I obsess over the questions, “What have I done in the last year? How have I improved myself? How can I do better next year?” Because there are always ways to make yourself better. There are always new things to try, new places to see, new friends to talk to, new skills to learn, new….anything.

I don’t expect everyone to get it. Most people I meet are fairly happy doing basically the same thing, day in and day out. They accept life for what it is currently and can exist that way for years, even if they’re unhappy. I see it all day, every day at my current job.

To me, it’s utterly terrifying.

Real change is difficult. It’s unfamiliar and it takes a lot of effort. I’m often scared when I start something new that I won’t be good at it. Or that I’ll ruin the small life I’ve built for myself. Or that I’ll disappoint or hurt someone, because what I currently want is exactly the opposite of what I said I wanted (and what I really did want) at some earlier point in time.

Why throw away my decent paying job and benefits for something totally unknown when I could just…not? Besides, I have a husband to think of. My parents paid for that college education of mine for this specific industry I now want to leave. I made promises, and I should keep them, whether or not I believe in them now. Things will get better eventually, right? This is what I wanted 6 years ago, so if I just wait it out, I’m sure I’ll eventually get used to it and just be happy. 

Or I’ll just go numb.

So I choose not to sit around and think about how I could be happier. I choose to allow myself to change as much as I want to, as often as I want to. I’m not looking for the internet’s answer to happiness, I’m looking for my answer to happiness.

I can change. I can be different. I can want something new today.

I can change. 

I can be different.

I can want something new today.