How do you know if you are growing or just changing?

The short answer: growth is change in the direction of yourself. Change is just movement. Both feel like progress from the inside, which is why they are so hard to tell apart. The test is afterwards: growth leaves you more recognisable to the people who knew you best, and change can leave you a stranger to them, and to yourself.

A great deal of what gets called growth is not. People reinvent themselves, adopt new vocabularies, change their friends and their politics and their clothes, and feel transformed. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they have just moved house inside themselves and taken nothing with them.

What growth does

It adds. You can do a thing you could not do. You can hold a feeling you used to flee from. You can be in a room that used to make you small, and stay your own size. What you were before is still there; it has been extended.

Growth is also slow, usually invisible while it is happening, and nearly always uncomfortable in a particular way: the discomfort of staying with something rather than the thrill of leaving it.

What mere change does

It replaces. The old self is not extended; it is swapped out. This feels wonderful for a while, because the old self had problems and the new one has not had time to acquire any.

Change is often fast, often announced, and often accompanied by a story about who you used to be that is less kind than the truth. The person who has merely changed needs the old self to have been wrong. The person who has grown can be fond of them.

The wound test

Some change is done to you. A loss, an illness, a betrayal: these alter a person whether they consent or not, and the alteration can look like growth because it is dramatic and it hurts.

The question is what you do with it. A wound that is carried, examined, and slowly integrated becomes growth. A wound that is simply let run becomes a different person, and not always one you would have chosen. The thing that happened does not decide which. You do, afterwards, over a long time, mostly by whether you are willing to look at it.

Three questions

Can I still do what I could do before, and more? Do the people who have loved me longest see more of me, or less? Would the person I was five years ago be glad, or frightened?

Growth passes all three. Change can fail any of them and still feel, from the inside, exactly like growth.

Where this is in the book

The Transformation is the fourth scene of chapter five. A man is wounded in a forest and the wound begins to change him into something else, before he or anybody with him understands what has happened. The scene is about change that arrives without consent, and the moment at which what a person does with it starts to matter more than what was done to them.