I’m the type of person who likes things to stay the same at home. I don’t rearrange furniture for fun or swap out pictures to bring new life into my space. No. I have a poster hanging above my bed and when it gets old, faded, or ripped, I plan on buying the exact same poster and putting it in the exact same place. Whenever I’ve moved, my apartment looks like a replica of the previous one, as much as it can given spacing is different, windows are in new places, etc.

Given that predilection, the past two weeks have been veeeeeeery difficult because of construction taking place inside my apartment. My home was in complete disarray and I can’t put things back how they were before. My bookcase can no longer be flush against the wall due to an electrical panel and that means I had to move my plants and my pictures. My friend Nicole calls this “forced feng shui,” which is spot on. It doesn’t matter if it looks good or I like it, I’m forced to change things. I hate it. But at the same time, I’m taking this as an opportunity to do some upgrades.

During the pandemic, my wall heater broke and my landlord replaced it but the new one was smaller than the old one. That created a border around the new heater, exposing the unpainted wall. I didn’t ask my landlord to repaint it because I didn’t want a stranger in my home longer than they needed to be because this was the height of the pandemic when the risk of contracting COVID was high. So I lived with a border around my heater. For years.

Sometimes change makes things better. Photo by Theme Photos on Unsplash

When the current construction crew needed to repaint part of my wall because of moving the electrical panel, I asked them to paint around the wall heater too and they did. Yes, the construction is a nuisance, but also it’s an upgrade. My place looks better than it did before. This same principle applies to other areas of life as well. Frequently I spend so long mourning the loss of the thing I used to have – a job, relationship, community, whatever – that I forget it could be making space for something better.

More than a decade ago I released my memoir, Just a Girl from Kansas, and the subtitle was, “One woman’s dreams are ant-sized compared to what lay ahead.” (Side note: I know that’s grammatically incorrect but “lay ahead” felt more open and resonant to me than “lies ahead.”) I used to believe that. Everything in my life kept getting better and better until I hit my Saturn return at age 28. At that point, life got very, very hard and most of the optimism about my personal future leaked out of me like a deflating balloon. Believing I was getting an upgrade felt almost impossible. It felt more like I was getting beaten down by life.

I’ve slowly been coming out of that and am starting to believe things can be better than I envisioned for myself. The dream I had in my 20s was to be the editor of a magazine, which I was. What I do now, ghostwriting for therapists and working as a freelance journalist, is so much more interesting and fulfilling than working for one publication. This, too, is an upgrade.

The energy of my life right now is, “Can you let go of the way you think things should be? Can you instead make room for what wants to be birthed, which is better than you imagined anyway?” It’s a process, but I’m working on it because it turns out I enjoy upgrades.

I dream of a world where we understand sometimes the old has to leave our lives to make room for something better. A world where we recognize what we want for ourselves can be less than what the universe wants for us. A world where instead of viewing certain experiences as a hassle, we see them as potential upgrades.

Another world is not only possible, it’s probable.