Transformation Purgatory
Change moves at its own pace.
You can always feel a transformation is underway well before you cross over. It starts with a seed of doubt, a subtle shift in attitude towards that facet of your life you’re struggling with (habit, relationship, career, etc). But the early stages of metamorphosis are slow and repetitive. Yes, there’s questioning, but it lacks seriousness and intentionality. You just do it to alleviate the pressure. You do sense there’s support for real change, but you’re content to smother it and go about your day.
But over time, the frequency and intensity of the questioning grows. The call for change gets louder and more demanding. The process seems to take on a life of its own. You can still suppress it, but doing so causes more dissonance and takes more effort. You delude yourself into thinking you can walk two paths at once, cutting back-and-forth in the brush. And with each battle, the floor of discomfort rises a little.
You begin to ask yourself, “I don’t want to be/do X anymore, so why am I still being/doing it?” You mistake this for a realization, a turning point. You convince yourself that you’re committed to change — or if you’re even more deluded, that you have changed. But when you’re honest with yourself, you know you’ve just reached the peak of a nearby hill and the mountain is still off in the distance.
This kicks off a loop that can play out for months or even years. It’s the purgatory of transformation that goes like…
Do/be X,
Experience dissonance and acute discomfort,
In a moment of desperation, proclaim you’re changing, then
When the dissonance dies down, you fall back into old ways
In short, each time you think this time is different. But you never want it badly enough. The gravity of your old self is too strong, and you don’t have enough fuel in the tank to reach escape velocity.
So how do you finally change? How do you finally stop being/doing that thing you claim to despise so much? Honestly, I’m not sure. My gut says that transformation happens of its own accord *. It has its own aims and pace. It’s like when you’re the passenger on a long roadtrip and you can see your destination way off in the distance, but you can’t get there any sooner. You’re not at the wheel, and regardless, you still have to make the drive. Teleportation doesn’t exist — you can’t cut out the journey. You only get there when you’re truly ready.
Anthony de Mello said, “It's only when you're sick of your sickness that you'll get out of it.” The discomfort has to be so acute and visceral that change is the only way through. There’s no amount of reasoning that can substitute for the process and absolute understanding.
Maybe the most frustrating part is that the seed of understanding is there at the genesis of the transformation. It’s present in the very first moment of doubt — in the very first question that bubbles up. It’s intuitive. But it needs time to gain strength — and more importantly, for you to admit it’s there.
* A question I mulled over as writing this but couldn’t find the right place to plug in: can we accelerate transformation? I’m not sure. Maybe? In many cases, you can certainly make “upstream changes” that make it harder to be/do X (e.g. if you’re eating a lot of junk food, you just don’t buy it at the grocery store). But I’m not sure this is transformation as much as a workaround. You can argue its semantics if the outcome is the same. But I think there’s something fundamentally different about transformation. Discipline feels more like a stopgap.
I've been thinking about this lately. Or something related.
The feeling you describe to me is something like: I have gained new insight into the world / myself, but I haven't yet updated my identity. I'm still the person it made sense for me to be in an earlier context. To move on, you sort of need to dissolve your identity / personality so that it can reshape itself to fit the new context.
This usually happens by mistake for me: I felt it strongly in December when I got sick and had to lay in bed for three weeks, doing nothing. That gave me the space to rearrange my identity to fit what I had learned.
In anthropology, we call those out-of-life states liminality. Typically, all rituals have a liminal phase, where identity is taken before a new one is given. As in the military, when people are stripped of their hair and their names and called shitface for weeks before they are given new identities as solidiers. I think there is some wisdom to this process, creating a space to kill old identities to prepare space for transformation.
A friend who works a lot with rituals said about this that a ritual (including the liminal state) can be seen as a process that lets you access new agent states, where new affordances become avaliable to you. I'm not sure exactly what to make of all of this - but I think it might be valuable to explore rituals (say, secluding yourself in the woods without internet etc) as a way to accelerate transformation. Loose thoughts. Good to see you writing.