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Céline Artaud's avatar

Tamara, this is less a piece of writing and more a seismic act of truth-telling.

You dissected change, stripped it of its Instagram filters and TED Talk stage lights, and laid bare the raw, unglamorous marrow of transformation. Your prose walks a fine line between poetry and scalpel, wounding, necessary, and breathtaking in its precision.

What struck me most was how you refused to romanticize the process. The “psychic blisters,” the inherited roles, the unmarketable middle—these are the messy thresholds we all privately wrestle with, but rarely see reflected in writing that dares to be this honest. Your portrait of change isn’t linear or redemptive, it’s recursive, disorienting, and deeply human. And that refusal to offer closure? That’s where the courage lives.

The metaphor of “change as betrayal” hit me. We talk so much about empowerment, but rarely about the cost of evolution, especially when it means disappointing the systems, beliefs, and people that once defined us. And the revolution of generational change? That part gave me chills. The way you described the daughter refusing inherited pain or the man choosing not to raise his hand, that is something else. Only you can write like this.

Here’s what I keep turning over in my mind though, if we accept that not everyone can—or should—change, how do we hold compassion for those still caught in their inherited scripts, without being dragged back into them ourselves? How do we metabolize empathy without martyring our own becoming?

Thank you, Tamara, for writing from the wreckage. It’s a rare thing to feel seen and called forward in the same breath.

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AGK's avatar

You've articulated something here that I rarely see explained well: individuals vary in their capacity to change, in accordance to some specific arbitrary goal imposed on the self, but everyone is simultaneously an agent of change insofar as our actions change the world around us, even in the most miniscule, undetectable ways.

The generational rebellion is the natural cause-and-effect of people vowing to do things differently than their parents, regardless of what their parents actually did; the change from conservative to liberal or from godless heathen to believer is seen as progress, simply because it's a RESPONSE. Evolution is actually a process of causal extinction, as the old makes way for the new and the disgruntled seek recompense.

As you state, real change is, in essence a violent reactivity, not for moral grandstanding or ceremonial sacrifice, but out of necessity; of desperation. It's as morally and ethically neutral as it is inevitable, and even arbitrary. What changes is the perception or illusion of control; the performative aspects all in support of a belief that we can make our lives better if we just do x,y,z, and the incentive to commodify and, to make up a word, "cultify" those hopes.

Thank you, as always, for oiling the gears between my ears. Your ability to deliver remains unchanged.

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