Change is never easy. It’s slow and inevitable and terrifying. When I was growing up, I vowed to myself that I would never change. Too long I’d seen old friends become absolute strangers and I thought stemming that tide would be for the best. After all, why would I ever want to stop being the me that I was? A person that liked to occupy the most secretive nook in the corner and read with book in hand? A person that had the most vivid of imaginations that being the only child wasn’t as lonely a burden as my mother thought it was?

But life isn’t so easy as wishing quietly to yourself that you will never change and hoping that will forever remain the case.

When my stint in tertiary education ended, I found myself with far too much time and freedom. The price for not having the routine of attending classes and lectures and hanging out with friends meant that I also had responsibilities. After all, my mother and grandmother can’t keep supporting me until the end of time. Nor would they be willing to fund what they saw as my ‘gaming’ addiction.

I needed a job.

For that, I needed to change. Perhaps not as drastically as I thought ‘changes’ meant but it meant stepping out of my comfort zone and ‘growing up.’ I’ve ranted a few times on my blog that in the workplace, I’ve become the ‘reliable’ one. The one people go to when they have questions about hard complex functions because my high school education at a selective high school meant that I am also a repository of knowledge.

In order to become the ‘reliable’ one, though, I had to demonstrate a side of myself that hasn’t always been prevalent in my previous incarnations throughout high school. The hard worker. The person that keeps their nose to the grindstone and barely takes a few days off.

But even that was no easy feat. 

My career has had its ups and downs. My first real job was something I kind of fell into when my mother saw me lounging around the house after I’d wrapped up my final uni course and was waiting for the graduation ceremony where I’d be given the degree I’d worked so hard for. 

Funny now how it sits uselessly on my desk, untouched and essentially useless in the grand scheme of things.

While I showed that I was no slouch in the workplace, the work there was dragging at my soul. There were months when I dreaded going into work. Even though I had vowed for no change in my life back in my younger years, I knew that if something didn’t change in my current predicament, I would do something drastic.

Perhaps I hadn’t yet adjusted to the idea of full-time work. Or maybe the work I was doing simply wasn’t for me.

It took courage for me to finally tell my mother that I couldn’t continue like this and tender my resignation letter before going on the hunt for a new job that I wanted to do and would look past my relatively sparse history of employment as I’d never taken up anything during my years in high school or at university.

But change isn’t always about better job prospects (though my recent internal promotion is something that is both exciting and nervous). Change can be about the simple things or the ones that others might not see. My friends might have laughed at the idea that I was sprucing up my look by growing out my fringe but considering that I had the same haircut for fifteen years meant that even this subtle change in appearance was a huge step for me.

And though I didn’t achieve my goal of moving out, there are other things that have changed for me. Namely, my perception of friendship and the notion of ‘adulting.’

I, Kyndaris, have always been a creature of habit and routine. For years, I had done my due diligence in attending school, going to my lectures, working my 9-5 job. Despite that, it’s been the small choices that I’ve made that seem to have made the biggest impact on those that I know.

My decision to return to my old high school gym for weekly badminton saw me reunite with an old friend. Through my interactions with her, she was able to grow and change. I can’t say whether my actions were for good or for ill but from what she has told me, I played some part in motivating her in her own projects and path of self-discovery.

Though I know not many read my blogs or the stories that I crank out onto FictionPress, I like to think that some of the things I’ve chosen to do have also helped others discover new things that they might not have thought twice about. To be fair, though, the thought that I could make any ever-lasting change in someone else’s life seems downright impossible. I’ve never thought myself capable of wielding such a power (and my readership seems to similarly indicate that this is the case). Even if I did, I wouldn’t know what to do with it except maybe encourage people to stop running the world into the ground.

So, after nearly three decades on this Earth (my birthday being the week before this blog post goes up), I’ve learned that I definitely am no longer the young child that I was before. Yes, the person that I was will forever remain a part of who I am but as the world turns, I’ve learned that I, too, must remain flexible and adaptable to the situations I find myself in.

Still, that won’t stop me from imagining that I’m slaying a mighty dragon, sword in hand, or piloting a spaceship. 

Nothing is ever static. And if ti were, I doubt the world would ever be as interesting as it is.

Even if I wish humans would stop doing stupid self-destructive things like plunging the entire globe into famine and pestilence.