It is all so easy

Two months ago, I placed a post-it note on the back of my bedroom door. It was a replica of a post-it note I had on my door over three years ago, while still living in Ardmore. The original post-it note had been given to me by Becky, who had received it as a note of encouragement from QK’s sister, Emily. I had been visiting the girls in Connecticut and bemoaning a number of issues to them: My hated then-job at P*****T, our dinky apartment with the leaky roof and the troubling exit of a former roommate, my lack of money. The girls encouraged me in a number of ways and then Becky handed me the post-it note. “Here,” she said, slipping it into my hands, “I don’t need it anymore.”

Written across the blue post-it, in red ink, Emily’s distinctive scrawl told me, “It is very easy to make changes.”

I tucked the post it note into my journal, and when I got home, I taped it to the back of my door, where I had opportunity to look at it every time I left my room, and ponder it endlessly.

It is very easy to make changes.

Not to sound all Chicken-Soup-For-The-Soul on you, but this is very good advice. It is, in fact, very easy to make changes. If you don’t like your job, get a new one! Don’t like your apartment? Move! Why make it so hard for yourself? Think about what you don’t like in your life, sack up, ho, and change it. Period.

Six months after taping that note to my door, I had a new job, an awesome new Montana Man roommate, a cat, and we had made plans to move to a bigger, nicer apartment that would shorten my commute by 40 minutes. As I was packing up my room, preparing for the big move, I took down the post-it. I walked over to the train station and placed it on a bench. Yeah, it might make me a litter bug, but I also hoped that someone else would see it and take heart in the advice or something.

Sorry. I went to the Hallmark Channel place, didn’t I?

Anyway.

Two months ago, shortly after Ostara, I began thinking, a lot, about what changes I wanted to make in my life. Life was okay, but I wasn’t satisfied. I had started to get ants in my pants on a number of issues — my creativity, my work, my love life, my personal appearance. So I thought about what to do to change it. I remembered that passively sitting around never changes anything, and posted a new note on the back of my door to help me remember, that now was the time to begin taking those steps to make those things happen.

It is very easy to make changes.

Two weeks ago, I posted my horoscope and crowed about “new chapters” that were coming in my life. I like new chapters, I wrote. Lord knows I’m ready for them, I thought.

Now new chapters have been flipped open and changes are coming at me fast and furious. But I’m no longer crowing, and when I look at the post-it note on the back of my door, I sulk. Why? Change is good, I wanted change in my life. But these weren’t the changes I was intending. These changes I have no control over, and instead of embracing them, I am kicking my feet. I feel like a lot of things are spiraling out of my control and I have no idea how to get them back again.

I need to breathe. I need to remember that this change, no matter how much I hate it right now, is for a reason, a lesson. That this change, however unintended, is going to be the catalyst for other things in my life, better things. I can feel it. I have to believe it. And I have to believe that no matter how scared I am, and no matter how much I am worried about money and logistics, no matter how much I am dreading all this, that the universe wouldn’t give me anything I couldn’t handle. Please, I have to believe that. Don’t come back and haunt me, irony.

I have to think this way.

It is very easy to make changes.