Who Am I?

I will never again be the person I was six months ago.

This is one of the more psychologically difficult truths to accept as I delve deeper into The Reinvention Project. In small ways, we are constantly changing. That’s the beauty of humanity—our capacity for transformation, for adaptation, for growth in every sense of the word. It’s a trait to be embraced—but I’m speaking on a much larger scale.

There have definitely been some surface changes in the sum of what makes me, me. My tastes in music have shifted in notable (and perhaps predictable) ways. There’s no telling how long it will be before I can listen to fluffy pop music again without sneering (and, really, what did Colbie Caillat ever do to me?). I’ve always enjoyed Breaking Benjamin, but I have lately found a connection to their undeniably apt lyrics that I find oddly cathartic. (Feeling angsty? Pull out Dear Agony, their latest album. It’s magnificent.) There are music groups I have always adored and now can’t stand, simply for their connotations. Hell, there’s an entire country that, when referenced (and it is, with appalling frequency), has the power to reduce me to tears. And movies? Don’t even get me started on movies. Let’s just say Bruce Willis a la Die Hard and Harrison Ford a la Indiana Jones are getting a serious workout in my DVD player these days.

But these types of changes, which can happen under a nearly infinite number of circumstances, some completely benign, are not the only differences I’m contending with. There are certain fundamental shifts in my very personality, in the deepest core of who I am, that could never have happened except under life-altering circumstances—circumstances I never anticipated, but am nonetheless dealing with. These are the changes I’m grappling with the most.

To be perfectly frank, this angers me to levels I didn’t even know I was capable of. I’ve always been quite sure of who I am. I liked who I was six months ago. I was a well-rounded, stable, compassionate, loyal individual who loved deeply and lived happily. That some force outside of me affected such changes so deep within me feels like the worst possible invasion of my being. It disgusts me, and in my darker moments I’m furious with myself for allowing anything or anyone to weasel their way inside me so completely that they were even able to accomplish such an utter destruction of the components essential to who I am. So I struggle, daily, with this concept of the now-gone “old” me versus the in-progress “new” me.

Yet another facet of The Reinvention Project, then, is the sometimes uncomfortable and almost always exhausting notion of figuring out who I am, of reacquainting myself with, well, myself. The opportunities for doing this seem to appear at the most surprising of times, mostly when I find myself reacting to something in ways my “old” self never would have. In class tonight, we were discussing the book “Thirteen Reasons Why,” a young adult novel that deals with the topics of teen depression and suicide. I found myself, in the face of several classmates who were less than impressed with the book, vehemently defending it. Their arguments revolved around the character who commits suicide. Her reasons, they said, were not enough. Surely someone as supposedly intelligent as this character would never have been depressed to the point of suicide over such tiny things. Their (obviously uninformed) assumptions about depression, which the “old” me had no personal experience with, as well as their comments on the “intelligence” factor of people who consider suicide, had my hackles up immediately, and I found myself having to refrain from an all-out rant on just what depression can do to a person.

Depression is a topic on which the me of six months ago would have had nothing informed to say. The new me, however, apparently has a lot to say (fodder for future posts, no doubt), and my reaction in class has been food for thought all evening—and, as you can guess, prompted the theme of this post. Yes, I have changed, in ways I’m only just beginning to recognize. I’m trying to take such revelations as they come, without letting them overwhelm me. It’s not easy—but what about rebuilding yourself from the ground up is?

Lesson of the Day: Being in the dark makes the sudden beams of light that much brighter, and sometimes the most you can do is throw on the sunglasses.