Changed My Life #1
July 7, 2018 / 7:35 p.m.
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If I were to scroll back to the deepest archives of my Instagram stories and Tumblr posts and Facebook statuses, I am confident that I would find record of me referring to the following things as life-changing:
Iron & Wine’s “Flightless Bird, American Mouth”… “But not just because of Twilight, OK?”
SoulCycle, probably.2
Specifically, SoulCycle when the song “Green Light” by Lorde came on in class.
Whole 30, almost definitely3.
I’ve claimed a lot of things changed my life. Meals. Movies. Books. Hotels. Morning routines. The list goes on. The question of whether how much of it, if any, actually changed my life remains. Even the stuff that has stuck around in my life for years and years (looking at you, Weleda Skin Food) probably isn’t actually life-changing, when it comes down to it. Having hydrated, dewy skin is great, sure, but I’m fairly confident I would survive without it, contrary to the narrative we are being fed by the beauty industry every single day.
I have complicated feelings about the ways I’m sure I’ve thrown around this wording to promote a product, knowing (either consciously or subconsciously) that it would encourage people to click a link or engage with a brand partnership. I have regrets. I like to think I know better now than to refer to anything material as life-changing, but I’m not sure if that’s totally true either. The phrase is cemented in our lexicon. Scroll on your phone for 10 minutes, and you’ll probably see it. Even if you don’t, so much of the narrative of social media is the implication of something’s life-changing properties. We know that that new moisturizer isn’t going to change our life, sure, but the pull of it is based in the same feeling, which is that if it makes us even 1% better (read: younger, hotter), we should want it. Often, that want feels much more like a need.
Most things in this life that we describe flippantly as life-changing are not as life-changing as we are taught to believe. Sometimes, I think we know that immediately, in the moment. Other times, well. Hindsight is 20-20. So what is, then? I went on a walk earlier this week and I kept asking myself this question. If I weed out the filler and focus on the stuff that has actually changed my life and transformed it for the better, what’s left?
At first, I was tempted to conclude it’s the big stuff. Major moves and career shifts. The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized that it’s the very, very small stuff, too. The tiny choices made. The small impulses followed. So today I am kicking off a new series, all about the things that actually changed my life.
This brings me to where we’ll start. July 7, 2018. Let’s go back, back, back, shall we?