Everything Changes by Jonathan Anthony Burkett is coming soon. Here is the first chapter, free.
Nothing in my life has ever stayed the same for long. Not the houses, not the people, not the body I live in, not even the way I see myself.
For a long time I thought that made me unlucky. I thought other people got to have steady lives, the kind where the same faces sit at the same table year after year, and I got the other kind. The kind where the weather turns without warning. Where you go to sleep in one season and wake up in another.
It took me most of my life to understand something simple. Change was not the thing that ruined me. Change was the one thing I could always count on. And once I stopped fighting that truth, it started becoming the thing that saved me.
That is why I wrote a song called “Changes.” And that is why I am writing this book.
“Changes” is on my EP Life As I Know It, which came out in 2024. I recorded it with Elisa Polanco, who also goes by Polanca Pop, and I am grateful for what she brought to it. The EP has other songs that mean a lot to me, like “Don’t Give Up,” “I Can Only Be Me,” “Two Steps” and “One Life.” But “Changes” holds a special place, because it says out loud what I spent years trying not to say.
I am not going to print the words of the song here. If you want to hear them, the song is out there, and I would rather you hear it the way it was meant to be heard. What I want to do in this book is tell you what sits underneath it. The life that came before the music. The reasons a man who was told he had no future would end up writing about growth.
The song is about personal growth. It is about finding the strength to move through the changes life throws at you, the ones you asked for and the ones you never would have asked for in a hundred years. It is about the hard truth that change hurts, and the harder truth that staying the same hurts more.
That is the message behind most of my music, honestly. I make hip hop and soul because those sounds carry both the pain and the hope at the same time. My songs keep coming back to the same few ideas. Change is hard but necessary. Keep moving forward. Never give up on your dreams. “Changes” might be the clearest place I ever put the first of those.
People sometimes think songs come out of nowhere, like lightning. Mine do not. Mine come out of years. A song like “Changes” is really a summary of a whole life, squeezed down into a few minutes. This book is the long version.
I will say this much. By the time that song came out, I was a grown man who had already lived through more endings than most people see in a lifetime. I was not writing about change from a safe distance. I was writing from inside it. That is the only way I know how to write anything.
Let me tell you how my seasons have gone, so you know who is talking to you.
I was born in Florida on February 1, 1987. When I was a small child, I lived with my grandparents in Jamaica. That was a happy time. I had love there. I had people who believed I would become something. Their hopes for me still drive me today, all these years later. If my life has a summer, that was it.
Then, at about six years old, I moved back to the United States to live with my mother and a man I called my father. And the weather changed.
My mother neglected me, and she abused me, physically and verbally, for years. I am not going to describe what happened in detail. That is not what this book is for. What I will tell you is how it felt. It felt like being unwanted. It felt like being unloved. I was told I had no future, and when you are a child and an adult tells you that enough times, you start to believe it is a fact, like the color of your eyes.
I had a mental breakdown in elementary school. Think about that for a second. A child, still small, and already breaking under a weight no child should carry.
At fourteen I had my first major seizure. I came to find out I had a brain disorder tied to stress and anxiety, and it brought seizures and hallucinations with it. Around that same age I was sleeping on the streets, in cars and in parks. Fourteen years old, with a body that would not cooperate and no safe place to lay my head.
I worked with a psychiatrist, a psychologist, therapists and counselors. I took anger management classes. I was trying, even when it did not look like it from the outside.
On Monday, January 30, 2006, I had brain surgery. I went into that hospital feeling defeated. I was not sure I even wanted to survive. A hospital worker named Marise supported me, and I will never forget her for it. The surgery succeeded. And afterward, something in me changed. I made up my mind that I was not going to give up.
That did not mean everything got easy. I do not have a high school diploma or a GED. I have wanted to go back to school, and I have felt overwhelmed by it. I tried to build stability with steady work and saving, and then mistakes cost me a job. After that I made a choice. I chose to write. Partly to build a better future, and partly to honor the hopes my grandparents had for me.
Writing changed everything. Writing about my mother helped me forgive her and come to terms with my past. I published my memoir, Neglected But Undefeated, through Upstormed. I wrote the Friends 2 Lovers novels, Fighting To Become Champions, and more books after that, including One Life and Abuse and Betrayal. I founded Upstormed Records and started putting out music. I built Upstormed LLC, with online stores and blogs. Today I call myself an author, entrepreneur, poet and music artist.
And through all of it, I am a Christian. I want my story to show the mercy of God. Because when I look back at every one of those seasons, I can see that I was carried through some of them when I could not walk.
Summer, then a long hard winter, then storms, then a thaw I never expected. That is my life. It is still changing. So is yours.
Here is the first thing I want you to hold onto from this book. Everything changes. Not some things. Everything.
The seasons do not ask permission. Winter does not knock on the door and wait for you to say you are ready. One day the air is warm and the next day you need a coat. Leaves that were green last month are on the ground this month. Nobody votes on it. It just happens.
Life works the same way. People move away. Bodies get sick. Jobs end. Children grow up. Parents get old. Friendships fade. Feelings you thought would last forever wear thin, and feelings you never expected show up out of nowhere. Even the good things change. The best day of your life still ends at midnight.
For most of my early years I treated change like an enemy. Every time something shifted, I braced for impact, because most of the changes I had known were bad ones. When you are a child and the biggest change of your life takes you away from the people who loved you, you learn to fear the next one. You start watching the sky for clouds, even on clear days.
But here is what I learned, slowly, and mostly the hard way. The same law that brings winter also brings spring. If nothing ever changed, the bad seasons would last forever too. The fact that everything changes is the very reason I am not still sleeping in a park at fourteen. It is the reason I am not still lying in a hospital bed wondering if I want to wake up. It is the reason a boy who was told he had no future is writing his own books and putting out his own songs.
Change took a lot from me. Change also gave me my life back.
So when I say everything changes, I am not saying it to scare you. I am saying it because it is the most hopeful thing I know. Whatever season you are in right now, it is not the last one.
The Bible says it plainly. “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to mourn and a time to dance. I used to read that and only notice the weeping and the mourning. Now I notice the word “time.” A time means it starts, and it also means it ends.
I have noticed that most of us meet change in one of three ways. Some of us fight it. We dig in our heels, argue with reality, and spend all our energy trying to make the world go back to how it was. Some of us freeze. We do not fight and we do not move. We just stand there in the cold, numb, waiting for someone to tell us what to do. And some of us, eventually, learn to move with it. Not happily at first. Not perfectly. But we put one foot in front of the other and let the new season teach us how to dress for it.
I have done all three. As a child, I froze a lot. I did not have the power to fight, and I did not know how to move, so I just went still inside and tried to survive. As a teenager, I fought. I was angry, and that anger had to go somewhere. That is part of why I ended up in anger management classes, and I am not ashamed of that. It was one of the changes that helped me. Learning to move with change came much later, and I am still learning it today.
There is no shame in having fought or frozen. Those are what people do when they are scared and hurting. But you do not have to stay there. This book is about learning that third way. Not giving up and letting change roll over you, and not wearing yourself out pretending it is not coming. Just learning to walk through the weather with your eyes open.
One more thing about seasons. A farmer does not get angry at winter. He knows winter is coming, so he prepares. He fixes what is broken. He stores what he will need. He rests the ground so it can grow again. He does not love the cold, but he respects it, and he uses it. I want to learn to treat the hard seasons of my life that way. Not as punishments, but as times to prepare for what comes next.
I am not the only one who has had to learn this. Let me tell you about a few people. These are not real people I know. They are composites, stories built from the kinds of lives so many of us live, so you can see yourself somewhere in them.
Think of a young woman I’ll call Aaliyah. She grew up in the same apartment for her whole childhood. Same street, same corner store, same church on Sunday. Her life felt like it would never change, and she liked it that way. Then, in her last year of school, her mother got a job offer three states away, and they had to move. Aaliyah was furious. She cried for weeks. She refused to unpack her boxes in the new place, as if leaving them taped up would let her go back.
For a while, she lived in two places at once. Her body was in the new city, but her heart was still on the old street. She did not make friends because she did not want to stay. She did not try at school because it did not feel like her school.
What changed for Aaliyah was not that the pain went away. What changed was that she got tired of waiting for the old life to come back. One day she unpacked one box. Then another. She said yes to an invitation she would normally have turned down. Years later, she would tell you that the move she hated most is the reason she met the people who matter most to her now. She did not choose that change. But she chose what to do with it.
Now think of a man I’ll call Kendrick. He is in his forties, and he has worked the same job since he was nineteen. He knows every machine, every shortcut, every person on the floor. And he is miserable. He has been miserable for about ten years. He knows he needs to do something different. He has talked about going back to school, about starting a little business on the side, about moving closer to his brother.
But Kendrick never moves. Every time he gets close to making a change, fear talks him out of it. What if it does not work? What if he fails and loses what he already has? So he stays. And staying feels safe, but it is slowly costing him the one life he has.
Kendrick’s story is the other side of change. Sometimes the problem is not that change is happening to us. Sometimes the problem is that change needs to happen, and we are the ones holding the door shut.
And then think of an older woman I’ll call Queenie. She raised four children and buried her husband. Her house, once loud, is quiet now. For a long time after he died, she kept everything exactly the way it was. His coat on the hook. His side of the bed made up. She was not ready for the season to turn.
One spring, Queenie planted a small garden in the backyard. It was not a big decision. She just wanted something to tend. But watching those plants come up, she started to feel something she had not felt in a while. Not that her grief was over, but that life was still moving, and she was allowed to move with it. She kept his coat. She also started living again.
Three different people. Three different kinds of change. Aaliyah had change forced on her. Kendrick refused a change he needed. Queenie had to learn how to let a season end without pretending it never mattered. I have been all three of them at different points in my life. You probably have too.
When I think about what “Changes” is really asking of the people who listen to it, it comes down to a few things. I want to lay them out plainly, because they set the direction for the rest of this book.
First, the song asks you to be honest. Change is hard. Do not let anybody shame you for finding it hard. When I moved from Jamaica, when I lost my footing at fourteen, when I went into surgery not sure I wanted to come out, none of that was easy, and pretending it was easy would not have helped me one bit. Strength does not mean you do not feel it. Strength means you feel it and keep going anyway.
Second, the song asks you to grow. Not just survive the change, but let it shape you into something better. A storm can knock down a tree, or it can teach the tree to grow deeper roots. I spent years only surviving. Growth came later, when I started asking what each season was trying to teach me instead of only asking why it was happening to me.
Third, the song asks you to find your strength. And here is the thing. A lot of people think strength is something you either have or you do not. I do not believe that. I believe strength is found, the way you find a light switch in a dark room, by reaching out and feeling along the wall until your hand lands on it. Some of my strength I found in faith. Some I found in people like Marise, who showed up for me when I could not show up for myself. Some I found in writing. Some I found in music. You will have to find yours, but I promise it is there.
Fourth, the song asks you to keep moving forward. The past is real, and we are going to talk about it a lot in these pages. But we are not going to live there. The whole point of looking back is to be able to walk forward without dragging it behind you.
Those four things, honesty, growth, strength and moving forward, are what this book is built around.
I want you to know where we are going, so you can trust the road.
In the first part of this book, we will talk about the ground moving under your feet. I will tell you more about leaving Jamaica and what that move did to me. We will talk about change you did not choose, the kind decided by other people. We will talk about the house I grew up in after Jamaica, and how a home can shape a child. We will talk about my body changing the plan, with seizures and hallucinations, and about the nights I spent with nowhere to sleep.
In the second part, we will talk about why we fight change, even good change. Why familiar pain can feel safer than unfamiliar hope. How fear lies. Why we have to grieve the old life before we can fully live the new one. What to do about the people who want you to stay the same. What to do when change feels like losing. And how to hold onto God in the in-between, when one door has closed and the next has not opened yet.
In the third part, we will talk about learning to bend instead of break. I will tell you about January 30, 2006. We will talk about getting help, about changing how you see yourself, about forgiveness, about small daily changes, about the people around you, and about the changes that have to start with you.
In the last part, we will talk about becoming. How I turned pain into pages and pages into songs. How I built something out of nothing. How we change for the people who come after us. What never changes, even while everything else does. And how to live ready for the next change instead of afraid of it.
At the end of every chapter you will find a few reflection questions. Please do not skip them. Get a notebook. Write your answers down, even if they are messy. Some of the biggest changes in my life started with putting honest words on paper.
I do not want you to just read about change. I want you to start working with it, right now, in small ways. Here are a few things you can do this week.
Name your season. Take a few minutes and write down, in one sentence, what season of life you are in right now. Is it a winter, where everything feels cold and bare? A spring, where something new is just starting? A summer, where things are good and you are afraid of losing them? A fall, where something is ending? There is no wrong answer. Just be honest. You cannot move through a season you will not admit you are in.
Make a list of the changes that already happened. Write down five changes in your life that you did not see coming. Next to each one, write one thing you learned or one way you are different because of it. You might be surprised. A lot of people only remember what change took from them. This exercise helps you see what it left behind too.
Find the change you have been avoiding. Like Kendrick, most of us have at least one change we know we need to make and keep putting off. Write it down. You do not have to do anything about it yet. Just stop pretending it is not there.
Listen to something that gives you courage. Music has always been one of my ways through hard seasons. Find a song that reminds you that you are stronger than you feel. It can be mine or someone else’s. Play it on the hard mornings.
Talk to God, or talk to someone you trust. If you pray, pray honestly about the change you are facing. Tell Him you are scared if you are scared. If faith is not where you are right now, talk to a friend, a pastor, a counselor or someone safe. Change is heavier when you carry it in silence.
And please hear me on this. If the season you are in feels so dark that you are not sure you want to keep going, I know that feeling. I carried it into a hospital once. Please do not carry it alone. If you are in the United States, you can call or text 988 any time, day or night. Reach out to someone today. The season you are in is not the last one.
I want to close this first chapter with something I wish someone had told me when I was a scared little boy, newly arrived in a cold place, wondering what happened to the warm life I used to have.
The weather always turns.
It turned against me more times than I can count. But it also turned for me. It turned the day the surgery worked. It turned the day I picked up a pen and decided to write. It turned the day I could think about my mother and feel something other than anger. It turned the day I heard my own song played back and realized a man who was told he had no future had made something that might help somebody else.
You may be standing in the coldest part of your winter right now. You may be sure that spring is something that happens to other people. I understand. I used to believe that too.
But everything changes. That is the promise hiding inside the problem. And if everything changes, then the story you are living right now is not finished. Not even close.
To be continued in Everything Changes, coming soon.
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