Why are we so afraid of changing ?

Ghost world is a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes which follows the story of Enid Coleslaw and Rebecca Doppelmeyer, two teenage friends who are just about to end high school, the book goes trough their everyday life. As you read it, you start to see yourself in these characters, they are just normal people who are living their life doing simple things. Instead of having a lineal story, the book tell different stories about this girls' multiples adventures, however there is a strong feeling present in every story; the fear of changing. Why are we -like this characters- so afraid of changing?


As I was reading the book I realized how much this characters -and mostly Enid- are really attached to theirs past. We get to see this when Enid refuses to sell her “Goffie gus”, when she continuously  tell her “first time” story again and again or when she Enid wants to find her “Smile and Ribbon” record that she used to listen when being a little girl.



Characters with this characteristics are completely common in literature, for instance in “The Dead” by James Joyce we can see that Gretta Conroy has lived their entire existence with the presence of the absence of Michael Furey. (This is called Gnomon). Otherwise there is a strong difference between Enid and Gretta; Enid is a teenager and because of that she is attached to material things, while Gretta is attached to a memory of a person, this could have happened to Enid after growing up with the memory of her friend, but that is not clear in the book.

Why is so hard for us to let our past go and face the future? is it because we are afraid of the unknown? is it because anything that could threat the life that we have constructed with so much effort seems a bad thing? is it better just to live the way like we have know until know?

I think that past is something that we have insured, something that we already know and understand so it easier to feel safe there instead of trying something new, However is it important to tell that for some people this is could be completely different with a past that they want to scape of, in both cases people is trying to avoid being hurt. We can love the past because we have already live it so it can not hurt us anymore or we can be afraid of the past because bringing it to the present -or future- can mean that we can be hurt again. So is not a matter of what it was, is a matter of what could it be.

If we take the time to look in our memory probably we would be able to taste or feel the things that we have tried before, the power of the past is that in certain way we can re-live it. We can experience something all over again and in that process we can -fantasizing, of corse- even change it, For that reason I believed that we should not be afraid of changing. Try new sports, meet new people, go to a new country… it would worth it. I swear it.

“You're hurt because everything is changed. Jimmy is hurt because everything is the same. And neither of you can face it. Something's gone wrong somewhere, hasn't it?” 

― John Osborne, Look Back in Anger