Between The Old Skin and The New: How We Change

In early December, I stopped going to a regular meeting where I’d see my friends every week, turned down all social invitations at the height of the December holiday season, and happily spent New Year’s Eve sitting on couch in the company of three cats.

I love my friends and my family, but as Greta Garbo famously said, I just wanted to be alone. I didn’t want to have to talk to anyone, and if I could have, I would have retreated to a dark cave.

It was the beginning of winter, the period of the year where the days are short and the nights long and I wanted to plunge into the darkness and silence and stay there for a good long time.

When a friend asked why I’d stopped going to our regular weekly meeting, I couldn’t explain it. I wasn’t mad at anyone. The discussions I’d had with this group, and the sense of community I felt there had fed, sustained and inspired me week in and out. I missed seeing my friends there. At the same time, I couldn’t make myself go.

Perhaps I was going through a bout of depression? Certainly there is no shortage of things in the world to be deeply depressed about. But this desire to be alone, not to speak, to be solitary and silent, didn’t feel like depression.

Our days are defined by the twenty four hour cycle of industrial clocks, but our bodies constantly remind us of our animal natures, which are attuned to natural rhythms — cycles of light and darkness, the waxing and waning of the moon, and the change of seasons.

Perhaps, this year, more than other years in the past, I was feeling a strong need to hibernate?

Bears are best known for retreating into a cave, and spending the winter asleep, consciously slowing their metabolism down in order to conserve energy, rest and regenerate. When I am by myself I can sense something deep within me was shifting, like tectonic plates under the earth’s surface, I can sense that deep changes but I can’t yet see them.

Except that this solitude has not felt peaceful. If I am a bear, it is one who has suddenly awoken and found myself wearing Goldilock’s clothes. Everything feels too small and constricting. I wanted to change everything all at once.

More than a bear, I feel like a snake in the process of sloughing off my the skin of my old life. I’m restless. Irritated. I want to jump out of my own skin. Allergic to my life as it is, yet I’m not quite able to move see or move into life that I want to inhabit.

Some interesting facts about snakes:

• Unlike humans, who are constantly growing and shedding skin in pieces, a snake’s skin does not continuously grow, stretch and regenerate. At some point, a snake’s skin stops growing. To remove the parasites that have attached themselves, the snake grow an entirely new skin underneath the old.
• When the new skin is ready, the snake sloughs off the old skin all at once, like a shell, which it discards, along with any parasites that may have been attached to it.
• Young snakes may grow a new skin every two weeks, older snakes two to four times a year.
• There is a disconnect, a kind of lag time for snakes between the new skin and the old skin growth. While the snake is growing its new skin, but still living in its old skin is not painful, but it’s not pleasant either. As one boa constrictor owner reported, it does make the snake cranky.
• In the last stages, snakes have a low tolerance for being around people, they lose interest in food, and right before they are ready to slough off the old skin, their eyes cloud over with a liquid film, making it hard for them to see clearly. If anyone comes close to them at this stage, they are likely to strike out, unable to see what’s approaching them.

Unlike snakes, our skins stretch and grow as we do.

We recognizes change in time as counted by clocks, and celebrated by rites of passage ( birth, marriage, death, change of jobs and sometimes divorces and breakups.

But perhaps like snakes, our exterior realities and inner lives grow at different rates.

We all remember what it was like to be an adolescent, filled with raging hormones, living inside a body not longer a child’s, and not quite an adult’s, discombobulated with thoughts and emotions that didn’t match one’s physical age.

As adults we have this idea that change is somehow more predictable, graceful and somehow now under our control.

What am I learning, in this interim, itchy, I find myself still inhabiting?

Change is not only hard, it’s awkward.

It often makes the people around you feel uncomfortable too.

We don’t control the process of how change takes place.

Especially around this time of year we like to think we can set goals, make resolutions as if we are in the driver’s seat of car or the captain of a ship, driving our lives towards the destinations we’ve pre-determined.

It’s not that we don’t have any control. I still go to work and maintain my “normal” life though nothing in my interior life feels “normal.” A lot of change happens beneath the surface, in the dark, in places I can’t see but must feel my way towards.

I’m reminded of quote by Henry Miller “All growth is a leap in the dark, a spontaneous unpremeditated act without the benefit of experience.”

I’m definitely in the dark, but right now it doesn’t feel like a leap. More like inching my way blindly, out of my old skin, as I wait for my new skin to grow.