Change vs Growth

"You know how people long to be eternal. But they die with every day that passes. When you meet them, they’re not what you met last. In any given hour, they kill some part of themselves. They change, they deny, they contradict--and they call it growth. At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed; as if there had never been an entity, only a succession of adjectives fading in and out on an unformed mass."

I have long been an admirer of Ayn Rand's work and this excerpt from The Fountainhead has been stuck in my head ever since I've read the book. I have always wondered what she meant by this. I thought if there is no change, how can there be progress in one's soul? How can one's reasoning develop if it must never be altered? I was afraid to change, because maybe there was truth to Rand's words.

Maybe if I changed then I was no longer being true to myself. I was thinking of this because, when I looked back at my past self, I realized how much I have changed. For the better or worse I am unsure, but my hopes are that it is the former. Uncertainty has always been my forte.

Now, looking back with reformed eyes, I see that she did not have an adversity to change or growth. "At the end there’s nothing left, nothing unreversed or unbetrayed;" this sentence shed new light. I never betrayed my inner self. I have added certitude to doubt and expanded my reason, but it is change which is not change at all. I believe that Rand was thinking of change in the same manner I am now and not the way it seems to be tossed around.

I feel like my words are inferior and I am doing the entire philosophy an injustice, but I understand now that growth is different than change and I have grown it seems. It comforts me to know that, although I don't always agree with Rand, one of her wise thoughts troubling me has ceased to do so at last.