Ultimately, I'm a geek. A geek with good hair (and shoes), but a geek nonetheless. I often make weird analogies between high school science lessons and life-in-the-moment. Heat denatures protein—never forget that!
This week it's been all about catalysts. Because I know not everyone else is a geek, I'll refresh your faded high school memories and remind you that a catalyst is a substance that initiates or accelerates a reaction, without being consumed by the reaction itself. It makes some stuff happen and goes on about its own business.
I've been on both sides of metaphorical catalysis at different times in my life. I've done things that indirectly caused both good and bad to others, but I'm still standing. Sometimes it was intentional, often not. Either way, I have to bear the brunt of my actions, chosen passively or actively.
Other people have played their own catalytic roles in my life. They've come and gone—sometimes just as quickly—and often left me with nothing to show for their time and energy except profound change. Those few people who have been in my life for a really extended period of time are part of a symbiosis, a mutually beneficial, long-term relationship. They are the people I love, the ones without whom my heart cannot exist. (BFF's, you know who you are.)
But that's the thing about a catalyst; they have no real investment in the change. They aren't reagents. They have no reason or impetus to stay and watch the reaction, to see the equal and opposite outcome of their own actions. If they were really concerned enough to be willing to gauge their impact, they would have to be committed enough to accept and to admit their own culpability in the metamorphosis. That's a hard thing to do when your own actions don't even change you at all.
According to Wikipedia (you know, the experts on all things things), "Kinetically, catalytic reactions are typical chemical reactions; i.e. the reaction rate depends upon the frequency of contact of the reactants in the rate-determining step. Usually, the catalyst participates in this slowest step, and rates are limited by amount of catalyst and its 'activity'."
Although catalysts aren't consumed by the reactions themselves, they can be inhibited, deactivated, or destroyed by secondary processes. The fall-out of their equal and opposite reactions can kick them in the ass, can ultimately alter their very make-up forever. It's a little karmic in its own way, the thought that people who fuck with your life—through their own activity or passivity—may ultimately pay a price for what they do.
But you, as the reagent, won't necessarily be around to see it. You may well be so changed, so far removed from the original interaction, that you don't even know what's happened to them. If they'd mattered enough, cared enough to see how they were impacting you, they'd still be there and wouldn't be a catalyst at all.
Ultimately, as some Wiki editor points out, the change depends on when and how often the catalyst interacts with the reactant. Their role is often minute and brief, early in the process of change; they're there, and then they're not.
But every so often we cross paths with those people who strike us dramatically, in surprising and overpowering ways, who alter us so profoundly that their impact is almost incomprehensible in its complexity. I find the most difficult to come to terms with, the ones who leave the lasting repercussions that I'll spend years re-examining, overthinking in my own benignly obsessive way.
There's a narcissistic tendency to want to have been consequential in another person's life, good or bad, to know you didn't just spew forth some smoke from their tempered-but-fragile test tubes, but rather blew up their whole fucking lab. For me, being who I am, it's really difficult to embrace the possibility that I could ever have been so influential on someone else's life. Ever. My own self-esteem, so substantially lacking and timid in its burgeoning self-awareness, just can't accept how my presence could ever be so permanently tangential.
I know, however, the changes others have made on me. And I know how their very presence—their smile or grimace, their kind or harsh words, their undivided attention—altered my course, forced me to change my path toward my ultimate destination, wherever that may be. I will still get to wherever it is that I'm supposed to be, but I know fully (and sometimes painfully) that I'm not the same girl who stepped so tentatively into this journey, all because they ever were there.
[Special thanks this post to www.thesaurus.com. And blame Adam Taylor for the title. Fucking genius or not, it's all his fault.]
Comments