By Javier Sanchez

There’s a knock at the door. Your heart races and beads of sweat start to run down your temple. The phone rings and you feel a sense of dread because you know who is calling.

It is the old version of you. It’s the person you have told yourself is outdated, obsolete. But he keeps calling. He keeps wanting to veer you off course. He tempts you with the sweet call of comfort and familiarity. Don’t change, he tells you. Come back to the old habits.

Wouldn’t it be easier to lull yourself into complacency. It almost feels like riding a horse when every stride keeps you in a trance. Your head nods with acquiescence, following the patterns of comfortable repetition with every step.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Change can come in an instant to those willing to sacrifice the person they spent a lifetime creating. Part of growth means killing off the old me in order for the new identity to emerge. We’re just too afraid to go through with identity replacement.

This weekend I heard something great, something monumental. It was someone applying for a new position. He said he was a little unsure about doing so in the past, but he was ready to take the plunge. Until he finally concluded, “Why not me?” I loved hearing it because this kind of affirmation of self goes beyond change. It demands it. He defined the person he wanted to become.

Change is fundamentally a forward action. It establishes; it creates and dictates a desired outcome. It marks time and allows us to break from our past. In his book “Critique of Pure Reason,” the German philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we cannot understand time and space without first understanding that there is a to and a from. Movement is defined by a definitive start and a motion away from a first point. Sigmund Freud would later write about it as “fort/da,” a game children inherently play when they first recognize the disappearance and reappearance of their mother. Here. Then gone. Then here again – just like “peekaboo.”

It’s a game we continue to play with our old selves. It’s gone and suddenly comes back to haunt us. Yet to become the people we wish to manifest, we must repeat new and different patterns of behavior, which is not an easy task. The old identity fights back. Your body is wired for familiarity and comfort. The moment you change, it’s not just your friends and family who point it out, it is also your body. It keeps pulling you back in. And everything it tells you makes perfect sense. It has to – otherwise you would go insane. It’s the person you have perfected over the entirety of your life, after all. It is the person you have listened to, it is the person from whom you have sought advice. It knows you better than anyone else. Why wouldn’t it tell you, “Nope. Don’t do it, you’ll get hurt.”

Instead of fighting the old you – for that will never work – try asking him questions that reveal his own biases and preconceived notions. Why do I believe I cannot do this? Where did I learn I can’t succeed? You will quickly realize that your old thoughts and ideas about what is possible were all a lie. Lies you told yourself to make you feel better about your own self-imposed limitations. And worse, they reveal the excuses you’ve always told yourself. But they’re just that – excuses. Our brains are good at hiding the truth from our conscious selves to prevent pain. It’s better to stay in our comfort zone than it is to explore the truth of our own insecurities, failures and shortcomings. The path toward transformation is laid with good intentions and the smell of fear. The knock at the door is just your old self coming to bring you back to comfort and familiarity.

Denzel Washington said in a speech that he was inspired by his wife, who told him: “To get something you never had, you have to do things you never did.” Pushing forward toward freedom and change requires that you shed the skin of your old self. The question you must ask yourself is, do you really want it?

Javier Sanchez is an El Rito Media columnist, former Española mayor, and restaurant owner. and