Why I Still Believe People Can Change (Even Now)

I can’t seem to deny it—people’s capacity to change.

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

This time of year invites that sentence out of me almost without asking. Maybe it’s the lights strung up against the darkness. Maybe it’s the way we talk — earnestly, sometimes desperately — about fresh starts and clean slates. Maybe it’s the rituals — gathering, giving, pausing long enough to take stock of what’s been and what might still be possible.

Or maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m wildly optimistic. Maybe it’s my training as a therapist, where I’ve witnessed people — real people, with deep wounds, harmful patterns, and well worn defenses — slowly loosen their grip on old stories. Maybe it’s my faith in something larger than any one of us, something that keeps puling us back toward connection, care, and love even when we resist it.

Whatever the reason, I keep holding onto the beauty of human beings participating in change. Contributing to it. Choosing it, again and again, even imperfectly.

And I want to be clear — this isn’t a naïve hope. It’s not a denial of reality.

Because some days — many days — the weight of oppression in the U.S. feels unbearable. The long, documented history of racial harm. The way whiteness has shaped who gets safety, belonging, credibility, and access, while extracting and hoarding resources from others. The way those patterns aren’t just historical, but alive in our policies, our institutions, our neighborhoods, and our relationships.

Sometimes I feel it most sharply during the holidays. We talk about generosity while living inside systems built on theft. We celebrate freedom while benefiting from structures that restrict it for others. We gather around tables made possible by inequity we may not have created but still benefit from.

That tension can make hope feel thin.

And so — this is where I refuse to let go — I’ve seen what happens when people tell the truth about that tension instead of looking away. I’ve watched white people begin to notice how whiteness has shaped their sense of normal, right, deserving. I’ve seen the moment when defensiveness gives way to grief, and grief makes room for responsibility. I’ve seen relationships change when accountability becomes relational rather than performative.

When I stop believing in people’s capacity to change, I notice what it does to me. I get a little more closed off. A little more tired. Hope starts to drain out of places where care and generosity used to live. I’m less willing to risk connection. Less able to imagine something different.

And I can feel how that loss of hope gets in my own way — how it pulls me back from contributing to the change I say I want. Holding onto hope isn’t just about believing in others. It’s about who I become when I stay open, and how I’m able to keep showing up for the work and for the people I care about.

Change doesn’t usually arrive with fireworks or on a neat, pre-planned timeline. Most of the time, we don’t even notice it right away. I’ve seen it show up quietly. In questions someone didn’t used to ask. In a pause before speaking where there once was certainty. In a growing willingness to give something up — comfort, control, the illusion of being right — for the sake of something more just. More healed. More whole.

The New Year loves to promise transformation through willpower alone. Do better. Try harder. But real change, especially when it comes to dismantling things like whiteness, doesn’t come from resolutions made in isolation. It comes from staying in the difficult stuff. From community. From learning to be generous not just with money or time, but with honesty, humility, empathy, and repair.

So yes, I still believe in people’s capacity to change. Not because I think oppression will magically dissolve, but because I know it was created by human choices — and that means it can be challenged and taken apart by human choices, too.

Hope, for me, isn’t passive. It’s a way of orienting myself toward the world. It’s choosing again and again to invite truth into the room. It’s continuing to name harm without giving up on one another. It’s believing that a different future is possible — and that it’ll probably require us to live differently than we have. Not just as individuals, but together.

That we’ll build systems and networks of care that make healing and generosity more possible. Systems that support people in showing up with more courage and less fear. Systems that move us away from scarcity and toward something more spacious. More just. More free.

As the year turns, that’s what I find myself wishing for. Not a clean slate, but courage. Not generosity that stops at charity, but generosity that changes all of us. Not a version of newness that forgets the past, but one that learns from it. And for more of us — especially white folks — to believe that change is not only possible, but required of us.

Because the work continues. And so does my hope.