This week, I announced a slight change to my business with a new standalone writing option.

This is one of many changes in my life lately. Some are little (we changed mass times at our church) and some are big (we started a home school curriculum that changed the rhythm of our day). Change can be good, but it can also come with a lot of feelings.

Over the years, I’ve learned to lean more into those feelings. Why? Because the more I suppress them, the more likely they are to come out at an inappropriate time and be a thousand times worse than if I had just let them go initially.

So with that, this week felt like a good time to go into what I do to get towards accepting a change.

Acknowledge a change is needed

Honestly, the first step is to recognize that it is a season for change. I am usually a little slow at this because I like routine. Routine is calming to me whereas change feels too chaotic. So there are times that I will grasp onto my routine to my detriment. I am working on this and having the constant change of a child is probably the best thing to happen to my routine-loving self.

Sometimes it’s very clear cut that we need a change. For example, my daughter dropped her first nap of the day and fell asleep earlier for her afternoon nap. She went from going down at two to going down at noon. We went to mass at 12:30 pm. There was an obvious disconnect. Not that we didn’t keep trying to go to 12:30 pm mass with disastrous results. But it was pretty clear cut even if we pretended it wasn’t.

Other times, it’s not so clear cut. I looked at the current schedule and figured out the changes that needed to happen for more work long before writing even entered the chat. I realized that if I included more working times throughout the day that there was a possibility for me to bring in a lot more work. But the fact that it wasn’t at times that I could necessarily depend on consistently or that it was during hours that really didn’t work for social media was confusing me. What could actually fill that time?

Making a plan for the change

What’s more soothing to me than routines? Plans. I make plans for my plans. But I especially make plans when I know that some kind of plan is coming up. It lets me have some kind of expectations and gain back a bit of control.

In the case of the mass change, we didn’t go to church one week after we decided it was necessary. We talked through the differences in masses (the 10:30 am mass is much more traditional than the 12:30 pm mass), so my partner was just as mentally prepared for what was about to happen. Knowing he knew what the change would entail comforted me. We then talked through how that would change our Sunday schedule. We made sure to have a plan for everything, including what constituted taking our daughter to the crying room (our standards for that action were slightly different than if we were at the 12:30 pm mass). These plans got us into a mental space to know this was actually happening.

In the case of my free work time, I had been writing for years. It had been something I always coupled with social media and then I’d do some in my free time as more of a hobby. All told, I wrote a lot.

So when the time in my schedule began to open up, I just filled it with writing, more out of habit. And that’s when it popped in my head. One of my friends asked me what I would do with all of that writing I had been doing over the years as a hobby, and I had just shrugged. Maybe it was time to do more than shrug. I started submitting it to websites thinking that this was a bit of a pipe dream. It wasn’t, as articles started being accepted. So I made plans and learned everything I could about writing as a business. It seemed more and more real as I researched.

Dive in

With the knowledge and the plan, there’s really nothing left to do than to dive in. But you can do that cautiously, knowing feelings are going to come up and leaving space for those.

With our mass change, I knew that I was going to miss the family we had built at the other mass, so there is a bit of grief that comes up knowing that our life can’t accommodate that particular mass anymore. But as my daughter eyed everyone around us, looking for those friendly faces, there is also a bit of joy as we embark on finding a new family. I took everything as it came, and it ended up being much more enjoyable than I had anticipated. And best of all, my daughter behaved the best she had at any mass since she was born.

On writing, it felt odd that I was finally embarking on something that I didn’t think I was good enough for. I had been carrying so much impostor syndrome that I actually had to leave room for untangling that as I pitched and wrote. But as I moved along, I needed less and less of that time. And the practice seemed more and more natural. Diving in while being mindful that there might be feelings of grief towards having to redefine myself, as well as feelings that I wasn’t good enough, really helped. I could write through those feelings until I got to the other side of them.

Acceptance

Getting to acceptance after diving in doesn’t just happen. You have to work towards that. It can look a lot like tallying up how much good the change has brought to your life. It could be living with the discomfort until it feels comfortable.

When it came to changing mass time, it was pretty easy to acknowledge that this made life easier for us, even if it was a bit difficult to get out the door a little earlier. My daughter behaved beautifully to the point that everyone around us commented on it. We didn’t need to run to the crying room multiple times like we did during the 12:30 pm mass. Neither of us had to miss any of church. And then we were even able to go out to brunch afterwards before she fell into her nap. The way this added to our lives was unmistakable.

With writing, on the other hand, I’m living in the discomfort. It had been a long time since I had someone editing my work and editing it well. My grammar is based on my education as a logician, which mostly matches up with standard grammar principles. But not always.

So I had to swallow some changes that I didn’t feel were actually correct. I also had to deal with my meandering way of writing getting chopped down. When I wrote a piece and didn’t think I could possibly edit out another word, I had an editor edit out three hundred words. Brutal but probably needed. I’ve had to divorce myself from my work in a completely different way and learn what I can from these editors. Living in this discomfort as I change part of who I am is the best thing I can do for myself.

Acceptance of change is a messy process. And, at least in the case of me, it doesn’t get better the more I do it. You just have to keep your eye on the ball and eventually you’ll get to where you need to be.