Things that are different now I Have Changed by Sophia Hembeck

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About the book

The house that I live in has a sentence engraved into its wall.

J’avance.

I’m advancing. I’m moving forward.

Change is following me anywhere I go;

it’s written all over my inner landscape,

folding into myself.

I started this book in the belief that I could write about change, that I could excavate what constitutes transformation, to understand “the process” and figure out how to trust it along the way. Yet I am finding myself in a constant shift of what feels like performing open heart surgery on myself, trying to explain, whilst understanding, whilst doing. Amidst the constant blind spots sprouting every time I choose a perspective, I lose another. There’s always something. In many ways this book snuck its way onto the page, as if remembering a faint dream in the morning, barely feeling its presence. And then later through the day suddenly rushing in, with all its vividness into the forefront of my mind. It was all there – all real.

So I guess in the end this book is not exactly about change but about being alive in one body, one existence, moving forward.

– No wonder I am struggling.

When I started writing about my own life, searching for myself ("Things I Have Noticed," 2020) and for my self-worth ("Things I Have Loved," 2023), this book dedicated to self-narration ("Things I Have Changed") had actually already begun long before. It is a collage of all the blind spots and omissions, the things I couldn't or wouldn't see over the years. It is about the things I don't want to write about: my mother, money, control, obsessive thoughts, fear. – But must.

When does one begin to change? Is there a starting point, an initiation? Or is it, as W.B. Yeats describes, an eternal wandering up a spiral staircase, a turning in circles, recurring turning points, yet always a few meters higher?

I don’t want to write about my mother, I keep starting and stopping, but what I really mean is, I don’t want to write about myself, I don’t want to write where it gets dark, where it hurts, where the lines start to blur.

And yet, this book is an attempt to stay in that liminal place for as long as possible. Like waking up at night and waiting until your eyes have adjusted to the darkness and outlines slowly become clear. John Keats called this principle "negative capability," a state of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Can you ever shed light on a blind spot? Isn’t another one born with every discovery? Like your own shadow, which cannot be shaken off, no matter where you move.

The book is structured like a collage that weaves different threads into a large tapestry. When read in their entirety, they attempt to reveal the process of fundamental life changes. Spiral-shaped and recurring, always one step higher, one step closer to the blind spots.

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