We’ve All Changed
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
I just landed in Charleston, SC after having spent the majority of 2020 in Cartagena, Colombia. While I have kept up with my family over the course of the year, this is the very first time I’m seeing them in the flesh, maneuvering my way into their daily routines, and sitting in on conversations that don’t often make it to Facetime or over text. Unlike the many other times I’ve returned home after multi-month bouts in South America, this time is different. We’ve all changed.
These past few days have been emotionally difficult as I let go of my ties to Cartagena, the city that held me through a pandemic and most of my late 20’s. Saying goodbye to my life there was hard, but so is landing in a dynamic that doesn’t quite feel like it did when I left. And at a time when where I call home is entirely up in the air. The people I call mom and sister have changed. The home has changed. I’ve changed. It’s all changed.
There’s no less love there, but there’s an element of re-introduction to one another. The old identifiers have shifted. The interests and passions have transformed. Charleston, the home of my mom, has become a home to my two twenty-something sisters too and their lives and their way of being has evolved the more they’ve embraced that. So this time, unlike all of the other times I’ve returned, feels a bit foreign to me as I find my place in their well-established Charleston life…as a slightly different version of me too.
The hardest change is the one you don’t choose, the one that startles you with its undeniable existence while simultaneously sweeping away what was once comfortable and known. It’s the one that leaves you with one choice - accept or deny. Because the past, the way things were, is no longer. It’s not there to run back to or fight for. The person you were, the person they were, doesn’t exist anymore.
As I slip into the well-practiced dance of my mom and sisters in Charleston, the one brought about by a global pandemic and the foibles of three women stepping on each others toes in a 3-bedroom house for one too many months, I choose to accept. I choose to meet them where they are now. To discover the women my sisters have become. To meet my mom as the woman I’ve become and to see who she’s become too. The cocoon phase is over. Now it’s time to see how far these wings stretch on each of us, to admire what’s taken form in the dark of distance. It’s time to see who we are when together now.
