I don't like change. I never have; from the time that I was three years old and raging against the fact that soon I wouldn't be in preschool but would be at home for the summer - even that much change was too much. It's not a good thing about my personality or a bad thing about my personality, it's just a thing that I have. I don't like change.
Which makes me really hate to own up to the fact that things I loved at the beginning of the year I'm fed up with now. I guess part of it is leading a group - this was my first year in a leadership position. It's difficult getting through a year and leading a group with people who either want to commit too much or don't commit at all, who have too much at stake with the group or who simply aren't invested. It's even harder when you're incredibly invested in the group. But I still feel like something could have been done differently so that the group I loved at the beginning of the year wasn't just a dark cloud hanging over my head right now. I hate admitting the change - and I don't believe that that change is necessary.
Objectively, when I look back, I think I did a good job. I started out with a group of two returning members, myself and one other, and the group now is a fairly tight-knit group of eleven. Two are graduating and leaving, one will probably drop out, but most of the rest of us are likely staying. We've done as much and been as active this year as in any previous year, perhaps moreso because this year is the first time we've released a CD. Hopefully the CD sales will push us back out of the debt that we were in going into the year, as the people who were leading the group before me didn't really pay attention to deadlines to get funding from the University. All of that says that I did a good job in what was an incredibly hard situation.
But the problem is that I go to rehearsal and I feel two things: first, that no one thinks I'm doing a particularly good job, and second, that if I do less than what I'm doing now they would think I was doing an actively bad job. All of which makes me dislike rehearsals and the group.
The problem is, at base, my hatred for change. Because although I know that I don't like the group as it is, and I know that I'm sick and tired of how the group is working, I feel like I should be just as in love with the group as I was when I agreed to be leader at the beginning of the year. I feel like nothing should have changed, because I don't like change - I'm scared of change, and so I'm scared of admitting that I don't like the group as it is right now and stepping down or leaving entirely. At the same time, I know that the best move for me mentally is probably to do one of those things, and in all likelihood I should just leave the group and say good riddance to a frustration and a sink for my money, time, and energy.
How's that for an introduction? I don't like the aesthetics of beginnings and introductions, they feel false and contrived - nothing really starts or ends in life; as things are now, all cells come from other cells and all organisms from other organisms. So there are no new beginnings and there are no real endings, there are only changes. That might explain my hatred for change - every change is an ending, if you want to read it that way. Every change is the end of some story, as every story can only end in a change of focus -- we stop paying attention, therefore it is over. In preschool, admitting that the schoolyear was being exchanged for summer was tantamount to saying that the story of that year in preschool was ending, over, that I wouldn't be able to go back to it and to be that same person with those same friends. Every summer is a little bit like that for me now, there's a thought that next year will be different (because it will) and that since I can't go back I can't continue the story. And for the group, which I had so many grand dreams about and so many hopes for, leaving it or stepping down as leader is tantamount to saying that those dreams and hopes are forfeit, that's not how the story worked out, because the story is over -- things changed.
Well, things change, as much as I hate admitting it. And to the extent that things change, things end.
