Working on this article, I got tangled in pronouns. I and we, my and our, sprinkled with occasional you felt right when typing and spilling thoughts on the screen, but when I reached the “re-read and edit” part, I saw inconsistency–the worst enemy of expressing thoughts. But it’s never about what; it’s always the why, right? So I started thinking about the reasons I was jumping from my personal experiences to generalizations about us as a group. Wait a minute, what group am I even talking about? We as people, we as women, we as writers? And I think it’s worth setting this right for you, my dear reader, from the beginning.
Below you’ll find this messy article, where I use we as people who pay attention, notice, observe, and feel. The sensitive part of humanity that dreads the idea of living a life where you can wake up one day and hear or say, “I don’t love you anymore,” and shatter the decades built on an assumption of love, taken for granted as a fact that happened kids ago. The group of people who want to take control of their life as it is happening, transition after transition.
From newborns to presidents, we’re all doing the same thing–living. I used to think that life was a static fact as my roles in it–a sister, a first-grader, a teacher, a friend. The realization that it’s a constant flow of transitions, like from a best friend to a grown-apart piece of the past, has been overwhelming. I think that our lizard brain is programmed to make life less paralyzing, so it registers only “significant” transitions as facts that are done, like celebrating your 20th birthday when your twentieth year of life has just ended. These huge transitions are packed in the first three years of life and then happen less and less often, and we often find ourselves going with the flow, noticing an important achievement here and there until the gaze focuses on the next generations–that’s where people start demanding grandkids.
You lie and blink, turn your head, crawl, sit, stand, walk, jump, and run. You learn to talk, then–after a lifetime for you and a blink of an eye for your parents–you learn to talk back. You move from school to college, then from a place where you pay to learn to a place where you get paid to forget what you’ve learnt and start from scratch. You think boys are weird, and then you marry one. You try to figure your life out, and then you grow one inside of you. The problem with transitions is that you think you know what to expect, but life, God, or the universe, whatever you believe in, doesn’t care about your expectations.
When I was 12, I had a favourite video game called Zanzarah: The Hidden Portal, where my player character escaped to a world full of magical creatures. I was fascinated by the first location–a beautiful village with tiny houses, streams and springs, enchanting music playing in the background. Then I clicked on the map and saw only one area highlighted–this lovely village made up about 1/6th of the map. The rest was hidden in the dark, and I wanted to know what those parts of this magical world were hiding. To get to one of these areas, I had to go through a full checklist of items to collect and tasks to do. I couldn’t get to the land of fire before I had enough water fairies to protect me. And that’s the magic of games– as a character, you’re always ready for the next transition. Or, if you fail, you know the reasons and what to try or fix to win next time.
In life, we often rush through transitions and find ourselves in a new area of the map, where we don’t have the words to describe where we are and what we’re feeling, let alone enough skills to face it fearlessly. The culture equips us very well with vocabulary, patterns and scenarios when it comes to the world of infatuations, affairs, and love. Still, we fail in this area badly. But what about grief and pain, courage and excitement, soothing mediocrities and averages of everyday life?
Getting ready to become a mother was one of the deepest transitions in my life. All I had known and heard was how happy I would and should feel. Women who stumbled into depression and didn’t radiate joy were frowned upon simply because their loved ones didn’t know what to do with them. What if I turn into one of those shadows?
So, I had my baby, bracing myself for the glowing happiness, and the day we got released from the hospital, I found myself in a pitch-black area of the map: not enough skills and resources, no words to describe what was happening. In a video game, I’d die. I was drugged with hormones that were supposed to keep me going, but like main characters with superpowers who don’t know how to control their gifts, I had no idea what to do with this ocean of love, responsibility, and pain.
And here’s the overwhelming beauty of real life: when in dark places, you can move around, groping, absorbing and filtering, breathing and crying and drowning in echoing silence. Seeking love inside and outside, hoping it’s there for you to take somewhere in the dark. This hope is what pushes us from one transition to another, the lizard brain in search of the calm bay of predictable life that’s always out of reach. Labelling it as a transition instead of a milestone destination is liberating because it grants the right to be sure that it’ll pass, it’ll be over one day, and it’s changing me for the best.
Transitions take time, and that’s what we can’t afford to miss anymore. We don’t want to be assigned a life, and we don’t want to end up thinking, “Where did all the time go?” when we’re 70. So remember to put a lot of effort into registering even the smallest changes in how you think and feel to see where it leads you and how you can tune in, adapt, and trust the process while running it. Does it take time and energy? Yes. Is it worth it? Hell yes.