Hero photograph
Bella Devereux
 
Photo by Isla Huffadine

Last Word

Isla Huffadine —

Bella Devereux

In year 11, I spent the whole of Term 2 watching 15 seasons of Grey's Anatomy. 15 seasons with 24 episodes per season which are 40 minutes long. In shorter words, I spent 5.6 days straight watching that show.

After these 5.6 days, I came to a realisation. As well as having an unhealthy addiction to the show, Meredith Grey (who if you weren’t aware is the main character) is a bit of an inspiration to me. And I say this because if you’ve watched episode 1 of season 4, you would have heard Meredith Grey say this:

Change, we don’t like it. We fear it, but we can’t stop it from coming. We either adapt to change, or we get left behind. And it HURTS to grow, anybody who tells you it doesn’t is lying. But here’s the truth, the more things change, the more they stay the same. And sometimes, oh, sometimes change is good. Sometimes, change is everything.

Change is something we experience daily. It could be a change in our routine or schedule, change in relationship or expectation, or even change in our bodies. As much as I’d like to come up here and stop change from happening to every single one of us, I simply can’t. Change is inevitable. The universe will never stop throwing it at us. I think it’s fair to say we’ve all gone through some massive changes in light of the coronavirus, and have had to completely adapt to the situation, as we are now doing here at school. So on this note, if I can’t stop change for you, I might as well try to help you get through it.

So for a short story, I’m going to set the scene. Let's go back to 2019 aerobics nationals. It’s Saturday morning and I’m preparing to take the stage later that day. Now if you’re not familiar with aerobics, you dance around on stage in a tiny leotard. And I will emphasize the word ‘tiny’ for the leotard. So to be prepared and to stop any unexpected things from happening, I thought lets try my leotard on to just make sure it, you know, looks good. A few minutes later and I am faced with the most unbearable sort of change I could think of. The change in my chest no longer fits into the top half of my leotard. And I think you all know what i’m getting at. I mean, who could have avoided something like that? So, I had to decide, freak out or try to fix it. And in all honesty I did both. But I needed to be flexible, and creative. Like a lot of things that change, we haven’t experienced anything like it before. 

So my advice to you is exactly what I did. Work through it. Pick it apart and examine what options you may have going forward. It’s really the only thing you can do. So what did I do? Well I went around the whole aerobics squad, tried on others leotards, tried getting into mine a few more times and asked others for help. This included Mrs Prentice offering to make me a new one out of motel curtains. But after a traumatic morning, I ended up borrowing one. 

This story may have seemed unrelated. But it's the same as any sort of change we may be faced with. You can’t avoid change, and you can’t get around it. And if somehow you can avoid it, it’s probably going to come around anyway. As humans, we are constantly evolving, and that's the beauty of life. Sometimes when we change we can no longer fit the mould we used to, no matter how hard we try. But we have to remember these challenges we face, no matter how big or small, shape us into the people we are and can teach us the most valuable life lessons. So I encourage you all to think about the changes that we have and are currently going through, and the ways in which we can adapt to get through this together. Like Meredith Grey said, if we don’t learn to adapt then we get left behind, so if that means you have to improvise because cup A didn’t work, cup B will.