Every Day Changes

Change can be intimidating, but only because of the disorder it creates. Everyday, I change my clothes, my points-of-view and the compact discs in the car stereo according to how I feel that day. But those are ordinary changes, daily modifications that hold no sway over anything of significance; it is in the grand revolutions that life finds us.

When I first left home, I wasn't sure if I was ready for the changes that surely awaited me. Everyone told me that it was perfectly normal to feel nervous about a new environment and no longer living under the safe protection of my parents. That last summer after graduation passed in a hectic blur of activity and crisis, and when August arrived, I still didn’t feel certain that college was going to be what I needed. It didn’t help that my grandpa died the day before I moved into my new life in Wilmington either. I saw bad omens heralding my unraveling.

Of course I eventually came to love the mystery of this new chapter, and by the time I had returned to Charlotte for the first time, I wondered what I had made all the fuss about. But with each subsequent visit home, I began to feel the pangs of new worry growing inside me. I realized one day, very suddenly, that Charlotte no longer felt like home, that my parent’s house was theirs and no longer mine. I was a guest in my own bedroom and a stranger among my town.

I then began to evaluate what it was that made me feel so outcast in such familiar surroundings. Did the city change? Did Charlotte seem more developed than before? Yes, all cities grow naturally, but that didn’t seem like something that would disturb me so. Was the change all mine? I wondered if I felt different than when I was in high school, and, although I didn’t see it as clearly at first, I grasped very quickly how much my general outlook on the world had evolved. I grew more accepting of ideas and the people presenting them. I learned how to live among the masses, in the most challenging of situations with the sloppiest of roommates. I even evolved from hopelessly unorganized to clean and structured. I thought my mother was going to weep when she saw how sparkling my dorm room appeared on one of her first visits.

But not every change can be considered positive. The last two years spent in Wilmington have been devoted to rediscovering the ambitions by which I once defined myself. With 19 years of life experience safely filed away in the vaults of my mind, one would think that I have a decent idea of all that, but I don’t anymore. College opened so many doors that I’m unsure which one I should step through, and recently some have been slammed in my face, creating more stress.

In these occasionally difficult times, I try my best to look forward. I know that I can’t go running back to my parents just because things get tough. I’m not frightened of change, and I find myself at the edge of a revolution, ready for that next leap.