The Six Stages of Change

When it's time for me to move on, it goes a little something like this...

Last week, I broadcasted my last ‘Zeitgeist’ author interview.

For a year and a half, I was doing up to three interviews a month with memoirists, novelists, journalists, activists—even a famous person! And it was a blast. I loved choosing the authors, getting the books in the mail (FREE BOOKS!), learning how to read with an eye toward what topics or questions would make for good conversation, and making connections with new writers. I liked being able to amplify voices and stories that shine light on important topics like race, gender, class, ability, and more.

Interviewing Jessamine Chan, author of ‘The School for Good Mothers.’ She was awesome. I was OK.

I also liked learning how to be a good (thought admittedly not great) interviewer. AND, I liked discovering—on account of staring at myself on camera for hours—that, hey, red lipstick actually looks pretty good on me. I should lean into this. And also possibly invest in some really nice turtlenecks, a la Diane Keaton, because neck things are starting to happen.

So…what happened? Besides the neck sadness? The Six Stages of Change is what happened. Don’t bother Googling it or looking for the book; I just made it up. I think.

I find this is often how it goes for me when it comes to life decisions and turning points. Maybe this sequence of events rings a bell for you, too:

1. Subtle, nagging weirdness

   For a while, I’ll be going happily along, movin’ and groovin’, doing something I like or love, or have committed to. And then, without my quite understanding how or why, the shine dulls just a few degrees. I feel antsy. It’s like something has been lost, or is about to be. In the case of The Zeitgeist, I still enjoyed reading the books and talking with the guests and wearing red lipstick, but it started feeling more like something I had to do, as opposed to something I wanted to do. I was feeling like I wanted the time for other things. I wasn’t having as much fun.

2. Ignoring. (“Denial” would also work, but I don’t want to get sued by the estate of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.) This is the part where I try to brush off the nagging weirdness: It’s just a temporary slump, I tell myself. You don’t really want to quit / change / move on. What are you, crazy? You love this job / activity / place / etc.! And think of the benefits!

   But ignoring the nagging is ultimately futile. Because there it is, getting louder and louder, saying: Come on. Admit it. Your heart is not in this. Or, as John Prine might put it, your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you. But you’re not quite ready to listen yet, because you are generally not an impulsive person, except when cake is present, so you have to move on to stage 3. (You meaning me. I don’t know why I changed person there.)

   Also, sorry — for some reason Substack doesn’t want to acknowledge the line breaks I’m putting between these paragraphs. Maybe because they’re part of a numbered list? Silly Substack.

3. Cogitation

   At this point, I start in with the full court press hemming and hawing. Should I leave / quit / change? Maybe I should leave. What would that look like? Will I regret it? I make pro and con lists. I talk to my husband endlessly about it, to the point where he’s like, “Oh my God, just quit already and leave me alone!”

   And I journal. Oh, do I journal. I’m typically a very intermittent journaler, but when I’m pondering a change, I write so much that if my journal could talk, it too would say, “Just quit already and leave me alone!”

   When I was 25, I bought and filled an entire journal over the course of a year as I tried to figure out what the hell I wanted to do with my life. I’d started to think that a 9 to 5 (or 8) career as an advertising copywriter—something I’d sort of stumbled into after college, but then fell hard in love with—was not meant to be my life’s work. I was increasing drawn to writing fiction and essays and the like, but wasn’t sure how or if I could make that a bigger part of my life without starving to death.

   I hasten to add here that copywriting still IS very much part of my life. It’s what I spend the majority of my working hours doing, it pays my bills, and I like it very much. But I do it on my own terms. And long gone are my dreams of becoming a fancy, award-winning creative director who travels the globe wearing really good pants and excellent shoes.

   Oh, my poor beleagured 2000-2001 journal. Although to be fair, it was a novelty journal tailor-made for stage 3, with a title and everything: Turning Points: A journal of new directions, with illustrations and quotes. Still, I’m pretty sure that after I filled the last page (actually, the inside of the back cover) it popped open a bottle of champagne got plastered.

   

   The poor thing.

   

   blah blah blah blah blah 25 year old me.

4. Planning

   This can actually be part of Stage 3, but it typically happens in the latter portion of that stage, and I wanted six stages—again, trying to avoid a Kübler-Ross lawsuit—so here we are. This is the part where I make timelines and brainstorm potential next steps obsessively. It starts out speculative: maybe this is the timeline I could follow? Maybe I should do X, Y and Z to get ready, or A, B, and C to make the new thing work?—and becomes increasingly more concrete as I finally give in to the reality that, yeah, I definitely need to change / leave / etc.

   Deciding to stop doing a podcast (webcast? Whatever) is obviously not as monumental a deal as, you know, moving or leaving your spouse or figuring our your life’s path. Nevertheless, it did happen with The Zeitgeist, albeit on a truncated timeline: Over the summer, it was Maybe I’ll stop a few months after the book comes out—it will be good publicity/exposure to keep at it until then. Then, a couple of months later later: Well, no, maybe I’ll stop just *before* the book comes out, because I’ll be too busy afterward. And then: I’ll stop at the end of the year. Nice and clean. But about a week after that, I was suddenly like….

5. OMG I HAVE TO LEAVE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE

   There was no reason I couldn’t stop after my last scheduled guest. So I decided that I would. Not because I was miserable, mind you! Not at all! I was still looking forward to the interviews I had scheduled. But I didn’t want to line up anymore. It was clear: mentally and emotionally, I’d already moved on. And there’s nothing worse than staying in a job or place or relationship once you know for sure that you are ready to leave. (See: My high school boyfriend. My entire senior year of college. My last few months in a full-time office job. My being 35 weeks pregnant with twins.) But often you need to just hang in there for a little while longer, for practical reasons. The anticipation can be simultaneously terrifying and delicious. And also annoying. The having to wait, I mean.

6. Sweet relief—and sometimes little sadness, too.

   This is the best stage of all. You’ve taken the leap, and you feel GREAT. Sure, you may also feel a little like Benjamin and Elaine in the back of the bus in The Graduate, not quite sure what you’ve just gotten yourself into. Or you may feel a little wistful—or a lot—about what you’re about to leave behind. But mostly, you feel relieved. You’ve cast off the thing that doesn’t fit anymore, and you’re on your way. You feel exhilarated. You might also feel a little sheepish, knowing that this change is what you wanted and intended to do all along, and you probably should have done it sooner. But, like Dorothy in those magical ruby slippers, you needed to take the journey.

And so, there they are, my friends: the Six Stages of Change. And just like those other stages, they can repeat themselves, go in a different order, or get skipped altogether. The older I get, the faster I seem to cycle through them—I guess I’ve learned to trust my gut more.

Oh, and about The Zeitgeist: If you want, you can browse all the interviews here. AND, definitely check out the other author interview shows on A Mighty Blaze, including the gobs of past interviews. If there’s a contemporary author you love—including some mega-big names like Emma Straub, George Saunders, Dean Koontz— there’s a decent chance one of our hosts has interviewed them. It was truly an honor being a part of The Blaze, and though I know it was time for me to go, I’ll miss it. (Stage 6.)