The Power of Embracing Change

I vividly remember that day in kindergarten when I first learned just how powerful change can be. My teacher had just put a dot of blue food coloring on a paper plate in front of me, when she whipped out a dropper filled with yellow coloring and squeezed it onto the blue dot on my plate. Suddenly, that little blue dot turned green, and my eyes were open to the wonder and possibilities of metamorphosis.

Time and again since then, life has reminded me that change leads to discovery. It happened when my parents separated when I was 13 and I learned about loss and adaptation. It happened again when I left the familiarity of my home in Massachusetts and went to college in St. Louis, where I found my voice and my people. Of course, getting married was a major change milestone, as were the births of my three children and the moves to three different cities.

And each time life changed, so too did my perspective. It’s amazing how something that most of us innately resist—change, that is—is usually our greatest arbiter of life’s most important lessons.

And so as the life I had been living for 39 years started to unfurl last December in such a spectacular and public way, I was at least a little bit comforted by the knowledge that change usually leads to good things. As painful as every single moment of breath was for me at that time, I found comfort in the knowledge that my perspective would broaden. That I would learn new lessons that would shape my experience on this earth. That somehow things would make more sense once the change had settled.

But what I’ve come to realize since then is that it’s not just my life that has changed, rather it is I that has changed.

It took the most dramatic and sweeping change of my life for me to come to see that I was missing the point all along. Sure, as I adapted to the newness of each change, I grew as a person and I learned important lessons about other people and about life. But what I failed to do was to assess and understand how those external changes transformed me. I certainly was aware of how change had consistently affected my path, but I neglected to take stock of how the twists and turns altered the very guy on that journey.

And so I find myself waking up every day now inspired by who I am becoming. I use the word “becoming” very intentionally, because I know now the transformation will never end. But I can’t help but feel a sense of awe and wonder at how different I am today than I was four months ago, let alone in December. Sometimes I am overwhelmed by this transformation. Almost always, it’s a good sense of being overwhelmed.

So what does my metamorphosis look like? What’s so different about me now? For one thing, I can look myself in the eyes now when I pass by a mirror. For the longest time, the mirror was my enemy, reflecting the worst parts of me. The guy in the mirror was someone I didn’t recognize, a guy who was really empty. But now when I glance at my reflection, I recognize that guy. I like that guy. 
And that has been the single greatest change in my life, ever.

I’ll leave it to friends and family who know me best to make their own assessments about how else I might be different today than I was before the Great Coming Out of 2017, and in the meantime I will continue to embrace every day with an open mind about who I might become. And while I don’t know what that entails, here’s what I do know: I hope the yellow never stops dropping on me.