By Karli Trapani

3, 2, 1… Happy New Year!

It’s January 1st

The weather is cold and cloudy 

The sky is full of stars 

All I can hear is the sound of fireworks 

Pop! Pop! Bang! Bang!

But my mind is occupied with thoughts about the coming year 

New Years comes with many opportunities 

But many expectations as well

Questions are racing through my mind…

Will this year be exciting? 

How will I be able to make this year better?

What if I can’t handle the pressure?

Am I overthinking this?

Change is overwhelming 

New opportunity is exciting but scary 

I am constantly concerned with my ability to adapt 

I know I can do it but I continue to have doubts 

I wonder if others feel this way

Does everyone get scared by new things and changes?

I feel my ability to adapt is worse than others 

This is my 19th New Years 

I hope my feelings change about this holiday 

I want new opportunities to fuel me

Being wary about change is okay, but don’t let it hold you back

By Karli Trapani

Background of Interviewee:

Marc Trapani was born on May 25th, 1969 in Daly City, CA. He grew up in Walnut Creek, CA with young parents and an older brother. Growing up in the 1970s, he experienced some crazy times as a kid and young adult. When he was 12 years old, he found out his father was having an affair and his parents had a messy split. After two years of seeing his father with another woman and being a rock for his mom, his parents rekindled and eventually got back together. But his family’s dynamic was never the same. This affected him for the rest of his life and he continues to struggle with his feelings about it to this day. He has done lots of traveling in his life, has gotten married and divorced, and has two daughters. Marc has been a school teacher for 20 years, mainly teaching 4th and 5th grade but recently switching to P.E. He has had a ton of experience with change in his life and has had to learn to adapt to new environments and circumstances for over 50 years. Today I will interview him on his ability to adapt and how his life experiences have shaped him.

Interview Questions:

Yes definitely. I was a really small kid and didn’t grow much until I was a Sophomore or Junior in high school. So I would be called names like shrimp or dwarf because I was shorter than all my friends. Those experiences made me have thicker skin and be able to take a punch better. Also, my parents were not very present or nurturing in my pre-teen and teen years which made me very independent and I felt like I was on my own for most of my upbringing. Looking back, I guess it made me more responsible but I felt betrayed during that time.
          
     2. Do new opportunities excite or scare you? Why?

New opportunities, for the most part, do excite me. I love a project and something to complete, so I do seek them out. But I have noticed that the older I have gotten, especially in recent years, I am not as eager to do new things. Maybe it is partly because of Covid as well, but having a predictable lifestyle and just doing the same daily routine sounds better to me. 

      3. What are you actively doing to become better at adapting and embracing change?

I have been going to therapy for most of my life. I talk to my therapist about the traumatic events I have gone through and how they continue to affect me today. This has been a tremendous help to make me not as scared of big life changes and I feel I am getting to a point where I don’t automatically think negatively about change. This has been a long time coming and I have been actively working on becoming better at adapting for over 30 years. 

      4. Do you think you have gotten better at adapting the older you get?

I’m not sure. I feel that I have gotten better in a different way. When I was in my 20s, I was fueled by doing new things and constantly being on the move. I mean I went to like 5 different colleges, became a certified massage therapist, was an exchange student in Italy, moved across the country twice, and all in 10 years. I literally could not settle in one place and go through thousands of changes. So I feel that I was pretty good at adapting to new things when I was that age, but now I feel that I am better at adapting to more emotional stuff. What I mean by this is that now I can take a traumatic event or emotional experience and learn from it and adapt to that new feeling. That is something I never was able to do and am still working on.
        5. How and why are certain people more able to adapt than others?

I think it has to do with experience. As I mentioned to myself, the more I went through and dealt with, the better I got at adapting. I think this is because many things that I have experienced end up overlapping with new experiences, whether it is emotionally or the actual physical experience itself. For example, when I was 12 years old, my parents split up for 2 years. Then when I was 36 years old, I went through my divorce. Of course, these experiences were very different, but the one I experienced with my parents almost gave me a foundation for my divorce. I believe this is the key to being able to adapt. Being able to refer back to different experiences and remembering how you dealt with those will help you deal with future changes. So I do think that the older you get the better you are at adapting or even the more you go through the better you get.

During my research, I found many sources that contributed to different aspects of the answer to my critical questions. One of these aspects is the way people handle situations in their lives, especially hard or traumatic ones, which can shape how someone embraces change and adapts to those situations. Another aspect I found is how people process adaptation in two ways, assimilation and accommodation. This means that some people take new experiences or ideas and try to convert them to fit in with their existing ideas which is called assimilation. And other people process new information by changing their mental representation to fit that new information. The last aspect I discovered is a person's upbringing and the trauma they have experienced can alter their brain and make it harder for them to embrace change and adapt. This means that people who have experienced things like abuse or neglect as a child may find it difficult or scary to look at the change in a positive way because growing up it was always negative. All of this research has helped me formulate an official answer to my question. The reason certain people are more able to adapt than others is that they have trained their minds to embrace change and look at new things in a positive light, making it easier and enjoyable to adapt.