Life By Me: from Lifebyme.com

This is a little piece about change which I wrote for the amazing site LIFE BY ME. It's running over at their site Lifebyme.com as today's story. LIFE BY ME is the brainchild of Sophie Chiche, who I find massively inspiring. Thanks for reading. Nick  

CHANGE

Life for me is all about the capacity for change. I believe that no matter how tight a corner we find ourselves stuck in, there’s always a way to step out of that reality and reset the tape counter of who we are back to zero.

As a child, I used to fear change and took badly to moving house, changing schools, my father going away on business trips, or my mother being sick in bed for a few days.

I was scared all the time of something happening to my family, of every ache or pain, of boarding a plane that might crash. That fear, which grew as I grew, set me up pretty nicely for addiction.

When I had my first drink, at the age of 14, my fear instantly evaporated.What liberation, I thought, and had another drink. But the next morning, the fear was back. My first thought was, I have to drink again. And so began a descent into alcoholism, which climaxed when I was 24.

Once sober, I took up swimming at night after work. My logic was that there were no tempting glasses of wine while I was swimming disciplined lengths up and down in a community pool. I wanted my hands to be busy, and they found their work pushing through water.

During those night swims, I mentally and physically built the foundations of my sobriety. I came to know the simple spiritual joy of becoming healthy again. I began to re-think change as something beautiful, a supreme gift, and to un-think it as the epicentre of fear.

Stopping drinking led me to leave an uninspiring job, break from destructive friends, and return to college to study journalism. When I felt low, it seemed that everything I had been was gone. But then I’d remind myself that it was me who’d chosen to start over. I would meditate on that as I swam and swam.

Since then, across 17 years of sobriety, there have been many further changes. Some I chose, and some were chosen for me. Even if I feared certain changes as they came into sight, every time I reset my tape counter back to zero, I learned that no matter where we are in our lives, whether we’re young or old, stuck severely or just uncomfortably, there’s always the capacity for bold and beautiful change.

- Nick Johnstone