I Reserve the Right to Change My Mind
What if changing your mind isn't proof that you don't know what you believe—but proof that you're still paying attention?
I’m a Libra. We're known for changing our minds or having a hard time making decisions.
One of the earliest things I remember thinking about as a child was whether something was right or wrong. Good or evil. Heaven or hell. Right choice or wrong choice. Hot dog or hamburger. Absolutes rule!!!
There always had to be a correct answer, and I was determined to choose it.
And oh, the guilt and disappointment when I thought I chose wrong.
I spent a lot of my early life looking at things that way. There were two sides, and somewhere in there was the right one. My job was to figure out which one it was and plant myself firmly on that side.
Apparently, this also applied to ordering dinner.
I used to stress myself out trying to order at restaurants because I wanted to choose the thing I would enjoy the most. I'd decide on the steak, put my finger on it, and try not to look at the menu anymore. Then I'd accidentally look again. Shit. Maybe the fish. Move the finger. No, wait. A salad.
Mental anguish over dinner.
It drove my ex-husband crazy. It actually came up in couples therapy once.
“Luanne, the McDonald's menu hasn't changed in twenty years. Why the hell do you still have to look at the menu for twenty minutes to decide?”
The therapist suggested an experiment: What if I gave my husband a general direction—chicken, not steak; maybe a salad—and let him make the final choice for me?
Groundbreaking.
It worked.
Because the funny thing was, all that agonizing had never given me control anyway. Sometimes my meal was great. Sometimes the steak was overcooked. Sometimes I ordered something I thought I'd love and didn't. That didn't mean I'd chosen wrong. Sometimes shit just happens in the kitchen.
To this day, a man on a date who will happily order for me gets major points simply for taking one completely unnecessary decision off my hands.
Which is kind of funny now, because Libra is represented by the scales. And scales aren't really about choosing one side or the other.
They're about balance.
I've been thinking about what balance actually means lately, because I don't think balance is a place you arrive at and then stay. Not in this crazy, changing world.
Think about doing tree pose in yoga. Sometimes you lose your balance completely. Your foot comes down, you wobble all over the damn place, and you have to put your foot back against your opposite leg and find your balance again.
That's a big adjustment.
But once you get pretty good at holding the pose, something else happens. From the outside, you might look perfectly still. But if you actually pay attention to your body, you're not still at all.
There are tiny muscles working everywhere. A little movement in your ankle. A correction in your hip. Your toes grip and release. Your core shifts. Your shoulders adjust.
Micro-shifts. Refinements.
That's balance.
And when I look back at my life, I think I've spent a lot of it learning to balance by swinging pretty damn far in both directions first.
I've been religious and I've been hedonistic. I've lived with money and I've lived on assistance. I've been a New Englander and a Georgia peach. I've been the granola mom and the fast-food mom. I've been a Republican and a Democrat. I've been a stay-at-home mom and a working mom. I've been the city mouse and the country mouse.
And on some of those swings, I was absolutely convinced I had finally figured it out.
This was the right way.
Then life happened.
Something didn't fit anymore. Something I believed bumped up against something I actually experienced. Or I learned something I hadn't known before. Or I simply became disillusioned with the thing I had once been so sure about.
So I'd swing hard in the opposite direction. Well, maybe this is the right way. I'd spend some time over there, and eventually I'd find the problems with that side, too.
What I'm noticing now, as I approach another birthday in my 50s, is that I don't seem to need those enormous swings quite as much anymore. I've lived on enough different sides of enough different things that I'm becoming less interested in finding the side that's completely right.
Spoiler alert—there isn't one.
I'm much more interested in noticing where I'm standing. Why do I believe this? Where did that belief come from? Did I actually decide this for myself? Did I inherit it from my family? My religion? Where I lived? The people around me? Something that happened to me twenty years ago?
And do I even have to come to a conclusion?
Try having seven kids. Some of my kids could make me look at how they turned out and think, Well, obviously I was a good mother. Others could make me look at their lives and think, Jesus Christ, maybe I was a horrible mother.
But having all seven of them has made it pretty damn difficult to land completely on either conclusion. Maybe I wasn't a good mother or a bad mother. Maybe I was simply the mother I chose to be, and they became the people they chose to be.
Maybe I don't have to reach a verdict at all.
And maybe the strangest question for me now is this: What if I don't need a reason to change my mind either? What if, at any moment, I can simply decide that something I once believed doesn't fit me anymore?
No defense. No dissertation. No evidence submitted to the jury.
I changed my mind. That's it.
How fucking freeing would that be?
Of course, there's a catch. You'd probably have to stop giving quite so much of a flying fuck about what everybody else thinks about it, because people get very comfortable with the version of you they know.
Change enough and your circle of friends might change. Your family might not understand you. You might change careers. You might stop believing something that once connected you to an entire group of people. Or maybe everybody eventually just gets used to you reinventing yourself every decade.
At this point, I'm becoming less and less attached to my beliefs as permanent parts of my identity. That doesn't mean I don't have beliefs. I do. I just prefer to think, This is what I believe for the time being.
It can always change.
And maybe that's also why I can understand where people are coming from when they hold certain beliefs very strongly. Not because I secretly pity them or smile and think, Bless their little hearts. They'll figure it out eventually.
I don't know that. They may never change that belief. They may encounter everything I encountered and come to an entirely different conclusion.
But sometimes I recognize the feeling. I remember what it felt like to be absolutely certain. I remember needing something to be right because if it wasn't right, then maybe I was wrong.
Me—wrong?! No, not that!!!
And who wants to voluntarily experience a Tower moment? They're not exactly fun.
That's the part I'm curious about now. Not necessarily what someone believes, but how tightly they have to hold it.
Because life has a way of putting pressure on the things we think we know. Sometimes that pressure strengthens a belief. Sometimes it changes it. Sometimes it blows the whole damn thing apart.
So maybe changing my mind isn't evidence that I don't know what I stand for.
Maybe I'm just doing what I've been doing all along—rebalancing.