The white whale of drastic change

Sorry, summer lovers of the northern climes: the cosy seasons are soon upon us.¹

At one Bloomsider's particularly inspired suggestion, and as a parting tribute to the lively seasons, I've been tracking how many bugs I've saved this month.² Saved in this case usually means gently guided from a dangerous situation, like staying in the middle of a concrete path, having just been kicked by a kid who didn't even notice, to somewhere safer, like some plants off to the side.

Anyway, that number is fourteen.³ Not bad, but not breaking any records, as you'll find out soon enough.

I think my favorite part about somehow becoming a bug person in my thirties is that it's the most direct evidence I have that I'm still changing.

If you happened to catch my short video commemorating my tenth anniversary of becoming a photographer, you'll know that many things about me have been pretty stable for a long time now: photos, languages, piano. Even pixel art is just a natural extension of my love for video games. But the bug thing, even my precious spiders, whom I love like cats? That's new.

I find this particularly comforting because my greatest fear growing up was always settling. I didn't ever want to find myself stagnating, just floating along through time. Now's probably not the time to dig into why that is, but I'll cede that I was probably an odd child.

As a result, I'm constantly working on projects and skills and exploring. I don't like to stay still. And when I don't like something, I'll often set out to look for drastic change.

But I also hear, from time to time, that people don't really change at all. And it's true that my expeditions for drastic change don't generally result in finding any. At least, not for long.

I've been thinking a lot lately about why that is, and what really changing even means, and I think I might have a plausible explanation.

Basically, I'm currently a thirty-four-year old story. Right now, I'm simultaneously reading and writing only the last page in that story, the one sticking out of the top of the typewriter.

I can write myself forward, but it has to fit my character. Not just my personality, but my role in the story, my supporting characters, the setting I'm currently in, and my backstory.

I cannot simply ignore the previous pages, or it won't make sense. So if I wanted to really change as in change the protagonist of my story entirely, tossing the past into a recycling bin and starting from a blank page, then no, it can't be done.

To accidentally stumble into a Regina Spektor quote, "You can write, but you can't edit."

But I have achieved drastic change over time, and the bug thing proves it.

In one of my earlier memories, I'm standing on a cinder block next to my grandparents' plastic pool, frozen and screaming in response to a large spider that's crawled onto my leg. The kind of large you might expect to see on a farm.

In a more recent memory, a friend calls me over to a spider dangling down from a doorframe. I know this species reasonably well, so I simply place my hand under it, it lowers itself to greet me, and I take it outside with an irrepressible grin.

If those memories were from right next to each other, they simply wouldn't make sense. That's not how stories work; it's bad writing. That kind of change needs the help of a plot.

First, I needed the peaceful tendencies I developed through meditation and my college experiments with vegetarianism.

I needed my hands to be injured, so I could find my way to photography.

I needed an out-of-focus ladybug to convince me I wanted a macro lens.

I needed to move to Colorado, so I could meet a particular jumping spider perched atop a yellow flower in the sun.

And I needed to come home from Wisconsin to an apartment filled with baby spiders, so I could spend the next week capturing over thirty of them and taking them outside, increasingly desensitized and delighted each time I found one. Shifty six was tricksy and almost got away, and I was mostly proud of them for it.

Without a proper character arc, drastic change mostly doesn't make sense, but we can do quite a lot if we're willing to write our way there.

If there's one thing our species knows well, it's stories, and we won't be easily robbed of a good one.

I suppose it's just no good trying to skip pages.

Martin

In case we missed each other on the algorithmic seas, here are the other things I’ve been sharing this month:

1. I first came across this spelling for 'cosy' in either Röki or Toem. I don't have time to replay them both to determine which it was, but both are very cosy and fantastic games, and the point is that I've decided that 's' is more cosy than 'z'.

2. In this case, 'bugs' means 'things that are small that creep and crawl', rather than members of the order Hemiptera.

3. In order and identified to the most reasonable level of my ability: two-spotted bumble bee, swift woodlouse, common eastern bumble bee, fall armyworm moth caterpillar, triangulate cobweb spider, oleander aphid, German yellowjacket, red wiggler, dog-day cicada, dog-day cicada, dog-day cicada, sword-bearing conehead, common eastern bumble bee, dog-day cicada. Cicadas really don't know what they're doing sometimes.