Hi friends! Brief programming note: As you may have noticed, I've switched over from Substack to Buttondown. Substack has given enormous financial payouts to numerous people of questionable ethics (to say the least), most noticeably the genuinely dangerous and deeply bigoted blowhard Graham Linehan.
I've wanted to make this switch for quite some time but haven't had the spoons/energy, but fortunately, my extremely generous and smart spouse Matthew Bischoff helped me transfer things over, with the help of Buttondown founder Justin Duke. You will continue to be billed the same way at the same rate, so you don't need to do anything; everything has been transferred seamlessly so far as I can tell. Please let me know if you experience any interruptions or issues, but all should be fine as long as submissives@katesloan.email is in your email client's whitelist. Thanks for joining me on this journey!
I have a problem with change. It's a very Taurus-y quality. When a big life change is on the horizon, like moving house or ending a relationship, I am filled with trepidation and stubborn resistance.
The way my internal logic goes, my current reality is "the devil I know" – so any change represents a potential downgrade, or at least a disruption. It's why I get annoyed when a favorite beauty product gets discontinued so I have to seek out a replacement; it's why I've often stayed in relationships longer than I should have, even after knowing I wanted them to end; it's why I'd often rather stay silent about a crush on a friend or acquaintance than risk upsetting our entire dynamic with a confession.
But change can be one of the most glorious things in life, I've learned again and again, because it can lead you places you never dreamed you would go. Some of the scariest changes I've been through have taken me to some of the most euphoric places. I just had to be brave enough to face the change to begin with – or I had to have someone by my side who knew me well enough, and loved me hard enough, to give me a little push.
I thought about this when my favorite band, Hippo Campus, released their latest album LP3 last week. I first got into Hippo Campus in the summer of 2016, when they were putting out sunny-sounding indie-rock bops, the kind of thing you might dance to at a summertime hipster music festival, hands in the air. Their music flooded my bloodstream with sparkly dopamine every time I listened to it, these lanky innocent boys singing about girls they liked, and friends they treasured, and going blueberry-picking on hot days.
In the years since, Hippo's music has moved in an increasingly weird direction. Their tunes are still hooky as hell (I cannot stop singing "Boys" to myself), fun, danceable, but they're stylistically different and their lyrics are focused more on dark, personal stuff – even sexy stuff sometimes, where previously they'd been somewhat lyrically chaste. It sounds like they're more comfortable with the sound they want to create, and more confident in executing it. Some of the folks who liked them in 2016 might have dropped off as they've grown and changed, but they've also no doubt collected new fans who vibe better with their current sound.
I've seen this happen with so many bands and artists I've loved: when Regina Spektor started doing radio-friendly pop songs instead of eccentric solo piano story-songs; when Tegan and Sara ditched their acoustic guitars for a bright '80s-pop sound; when Amanda Palmer shed some of her cabaret-rock roots in favor of poppy Brit-influenced indie-rock. People get furious in the YouTube comments and even in the mainstream reviews, mourning the artist they've "lost" – when in reality, they've just gotten to see a new side of the artist they already loved. If they can't appreciate what they're seeing (or hearing), that's okay, but one can't argue in good faith that these artists are no longer the people they used to be. They're still those people. It's just that people change.
This has been an important lesson for me in relationships too. Any time you cling to your partner's current form, praying they never change, on some level you're limiting them. People grow and change; that's what we do. It's what we all do, whether we're conscious of it or not. Being in a long-term relationship with someone is signing up to watch that person transform over time. The best you can hope for is that you both embrace each other's changing selves, and manage to change in more-or-less the same direction so you stay as aligned as you were when you began. But even if you grow apart and decide to end things, that's still a net gain – because you both became truer versions of yourselves, and made a difficult but mature decision based on who you are and who you want to be.
When I was younger, I used to say that I couldn't imagine ever marrying anyone because I just didn't think it was all that likely that two human beings could evolve in harmony the way you would need to do in a long-term marriage. I had been in relationships before where we became so different by the end of them that we were almost unrecognizable to each other. I was so afraid of that happening that I thought it safest to avoid the whole thing, and just be with people who were compatible with my current self, whether or not I thought we'd be compatible with each other's future selves.
But now that I'm married to someone I want to change with, someone I want to grow with (even grow old with), my perspective is different. I do think that when two people have similar dispositions and histories, and spend a lot of time together, they often transform in similar directions without much effort to sync up. But also, I'm no longer as scared as I was of being different from my partner. I don't think difference is automatically a bad thing, any more than change is. In fact, it would be pretty damn boring to be married to someone too similar to me, especially for decades. I'd rather we be – to put it in the parlance of Stephen Sondheim – "parallel lines who meet." People who grow alongside each other but are never identical and have no intention of being so.
There might come a day when I no longer connect with Hippo Campus's music, just as there could theoretically come a day when my spouse and I grow apart too far to continue together. While I hope that neither ever happens, since both this band and this relationship give me untold joy on a daily basis, I also know that change is part of the human experience. Enjoy where you're at, savor it while you're there, but always remember that what comes next could be just as good, if not better, for the self you're about to become.