Can You Reinvent Yourself?

Living Happy

Photo by Chris Lawton on Unsplash

One time I was walking with my kiddo into town and she reacted in a way that I didn’t expect.

“I’m not the same as I was when I was eight,” she announced. “I’ve changed.”

“Grown?”

“Changed,” she insisted.

“Oh, you have,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“You have me stuck in a past version of who I used to be, but I’ve changed.”

“Grown up?”

“Changed.”

To be fair insisting on something was something she used to do when she was eight, too, but she had changed (or grown) to have a very different reaction to something that was different from how she would have reacted when she was eight.

“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” — John C. Maxwell

I loved her at eight. I adore her now. And to me, her essence hasn’t changed. She’s still a perfectionist and joyful and loyal and an adventurer, creative and strong willed and brilliant and exuberant. She still isn’t the best at laundry—just kidding! But how she reacts to things isn’t the same.

The concept of self as static is fascinating to me.

There’s an old article in the New Yorker where Ideas Editor Joshua Rothman talks about his four-year-old, Peter, and ponders what he might become and if who Peter is now is who Peter will always be. He writes,

“Perhaps Peter will grow up to be an episodic person who lives in the moment, unconcerned with whether his life forms a whole or a collection of parts. Even so, there will be no escaping the paradoxes of mutability, which have a way of weaving themselves into our lives. Thinking of some old shameful act of ours, we tell ourselves, “I’ve changed!” (But have we?) Bored with a friend who’s obsessed with what happened long ago, we say, “That was another life—you’re a different person now!” (But is she?) Living alongside our friends, spouses, parents, and children, we wonder if they’re the same people we’ve always known, or if they’ve lived through changes we, or they, struggle to see. Even as we work tirelessly to improve, we find that, wherever we go, there we are (in which case what’s the point?). And yet sometimes we recall our former selves with a sense of wonder, as if remembering a past life. Lives are long, and hard to see. What can we learn by asking if we’ve always been who we are?”

There are entire industries made out of the idea of transformation that we can become someone different, someone kinder, someone better, more evolved. Tony Robbins definitely knows this. Counseling groups know this. Pharmaceutical companies know this.

Still, there are some people who insist that they’ve never changed, that they are the same person who they were at ten as they are at sixty. They will come up to you after not seeing you for two decades and announce, “You haven’t changed a bit.”

And then there are the people who insist that they have changed, but you can’t see it.

“You’ve grown so much,” they’ll tell you.

A lot of the time when this happens to me, I’ll just think, “huh?”

“We all get scared and want to turn away, but it isn’t always strength that makes you stay. Strength is also making the decision to change your destiny.” — Zoraida Córdova

According to INC.,

“Progress in life is all about reinvention. I am going to preface all of this by saying that reinvention is not the same thing as endlessly seeking reward or achievement. There is a difference. Seeking an achievement usually implies an "end." You win the trophy and then you're "done." That's not what you want to aim for--because as soon as you say you're "done," you are no longer reaching and stretching yourself, which means you stop growing.

“Reinvention, however, leaves the end open--which is actually a good thing. Reinvention is what allows you endless opportunities to continue exploring new parts of yourself. Exploration is growth, and growth in this sense is not outward facing but inward.”

They have quick and easy steps because you have to have quick and easy steps if you’re a blog post, apparently.

Rothman dives deeply into the personal comparisons, using Tims he knows, writing,

“I know two Tims, and they have opposing intuitions about their own continuities. The first Tim, my father-in-law, is sure that he’s had the same jovially jousting personality from two to seventy-two. He’s also had the same interests—reading, the Second World War, Ireland, the Wild West, the Yankees—for most of his life. He is one of the most self-consistent people I know. The second Tim, my high-school friend, sees his life as radically discontinuous, and rightly so. When I first met him, he was so skinny that he was turned away from a blood drive for being underweight; bullied and pushed around by bigger kids, he took solace in the idea that his parents were late growers. This notion struck his friends as far-fetched. But after high school Tim suddenly transformed into a towering man with an action-hero physique. He studied physics and philosophy in college, and then worked in a neuroscience lab before becoming an officer in the Marines and going to Iraq; he entered finance, but has since left to study computer science.

“I’ve changed more than most people I know,” Tim told me. He shared a vivid memory of a conversation he had with his mother, while they sat in the car outside an auto mechanic’s: “I was thirteen, and we were talking about how people change. And my mom, who’s a psychiatrist, told me that people tend to stop changing so much when they get into their thirties. They start to accept who they are, and to live with themselves as they are. And, maybe because I was an unhappy and angry person at the time, I found that idea offensive. And I vowed right then that I would never stop changing. And I haven’t stopped.”

“Do the two Tims have the whole picture? I’ve known my father-in-law for only twenty of his seventy-two years, but even in that time he’s changed quite a bit, becoming more patient and compassionate; by all accounts, the life he lived before I met him had a few chapters of its own, too. And there’s a fundamental sense in which my high-school friend hasn’t changed. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s been committed to the idea of becoming different. For him, true transformation would require settling down; endless change is a kind of consistency.”

Endless change is a kind of consistency when we’re aware of it, I think. Sometimes we lean into it, start a program, start a course, start new habits, declare, “I am going to be a better me.”

But beneath it all there is still the ‘me’ there, isn’t there?

In Psychology Today, James Kerr writes,

“Human beings have the capacity for growth, learning, and personal development throughout their entire lives — it doesn’t end at a certain age. In fact, most of us change our attitudes, behaviors, and perspectives over the course of our lifetimes.

“Exposure to new ideas, experiences, or information often makes it so. Truly, we may reevaluate our values, challenge previously held assumptions, and adopt different perceptions based on what we experience throughout our lives. Clearly, factors such as education, personal experiences, relationships, and self-reflection all contribute to our evolution.”

He has the five key elements that facilitate change because of course he does.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old, but on building the new” — Socrates

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