Nothing works forever.
I’m sure you know this, but how often have you been on the cusp of a major change and felt hesitant about it — fearful of the stigma of making yet another change?
For those of us with ADHD, that stigma is built into our conditioning. When I was growing up, I seemed to have new hobbies almost monthly — if not more often.
Each time I embarked on something new, my parents reminded me about the ballet shoes and tap shoes in the closet, the art supplies in the drawer, or other relics of past infatuations.
The constant refrain of “why can’t you stick to one thing?” echoes in my brain, and with it the various labels that get applied explicitly or implicitly:
Uncommitted. Flighty. Lacking perseverance.
As a result, sometimes I’ve resisted making changes when I knew it was time. Other times, I’ve made changes but held back from promoting those changes, out of fear of what people would think.
They wouldn’t take me seriously. They’d think I wasn’t committed. And so on.
The Stories People Tell Us
Here’s the thing: the stories others tell us about ourselves are not really about us. They are about the people telling them. Those stories are their fears, their projections, their world-views.
I absorbed stories and beliefs about myself despite plenty of evidence to the contrary: activities, hobbies, and jobs that I’ve maintained for decades because they meet the crucial combination of
- holding my interest
- being consistently varied and new, allowing me to develop new skills
- involve collaboration with others
- fit with my strengths
5 Truths About Change
If you relate to this, here are some objective truths to keep in mind as you evaluate those stories people have been telling you:
- Nothing is meant to last forever. It’s the nature of growth that as you evolve, your interests will change. When you evolved from crawling to walking, everyone cheered your progress. Changing hobbies, interests, or jobs is no different.
- It’s the nature of growth and evolution to try different activities before finding the ones you like. The nature of what appeals to you likely has certain similar criteria, but it takes a lot of experiments to see the pattern.
- With successive generation, the average person has had increasingly more jobs than the generation before. The days of putting in your life service at the same employer are long gone. These days, most people will have over 10 careers — not just jobs.
- Change is the law of life. As technology progresses, certain jobs get phased out while new jobs evolve. There are jobs — indeed entire industries —today that didn’t even exist 20 years ago.
- Reinvention is natural. Trees shed their leaves in the autumn and grow new ones in the spring. So too, we humans sometimes need to strip ourselves bare in order to sprout new leaves, to become the next iteration of ourselves.
Love it? Hate it? What do you think? Don't hold back...