The disclaimer - tl;dr version
If you don't like it, don't fucking read it.
Who are you? Seriously considering the question, we can all fairly easily produce a few good answers that are mostly accurate. We know ourselves, right? I know I don't like radishes. I know I enjoy video games. I find it very easy to get lost in a good book. Shitake mushrooms make me gag.
That's easy stuff. But all those little things make up the whole of us, right?
I'm not sure where I'm going with this so keep bearing with me.
All these minute parts of us are used to make up the whole. Occasionally, one of them changes; "because of a bad experience I had at an airport, I no longer like flying", or "I realized that my best friend worships a guy named 'Stan' so we can't be friends anymore", or even something so small as "Hey, that peanut butter actually tastes good."
So all these tiny changes happen, right? They don't majorly alter who we are. Not really, anyway. We're still the same person. We act mostly the same (unless someone offers us some peanut butter) and nobody really notices. How is it then, that we often find ourselves speaking of a former friend in terms of "Wow, XYZ has really changed. He's not the same person anymore." Were they possessed by something? Were they really just pretending to be someone else in order to fool us into befriending them?
Probably not. Most people aren't dicks like that.
Every experience we have ends up changing us just a little bit. Day by day tidbits of us are being replaced by new tidbits. They're mostly similar to the old ones, but after revising ourselves over and over, piece by piece, we end up someone totally different without feeling like we've changed at all.
I'm the same person I was when I graduated high school.
...Like hell.
Fundamentally, I'm the same person. I like video games and online chatting and dislike most television programs and sports are awful.
But, I also don't play as many video games as I used to and don't chat online nearly as much as I did then. I go out and interact with people in the real world. I play board games and card games and random games with people. I watch Family Guy and American Dad and almost anything on The History Channel. I'm also a huge Pittsburgh Penguins fan.
And yet when asked, I will still tell you that most television programs are crap. I'll also tell you that I identify as a gamer and online chatting is awesome. Also, sports suck.
I'm not lying, but I'm also not usually thinking about the changes of heart I've had.
I know who I am, and a TV watching sports fan isn't something I can identify with.
We'll often close ourselves off to anything that will damage our self-image in a manner that causes us to have to rethink our identity. Why? The answer to that one is simple; it's easy to be who we are than to become someone else. Even if we've already become that somebody, we need that previous identity to hang out with our friends, to wake up in the morning knowing that we are, deep down, someone we love.
We need to know who we fit in with and who we hate.
We're fragile. We break easily. We also repair easily. So don't be afraid to re-examine yourself or others.
Always ask yourself two questions when you find you no longer enjoy another person's company.
"Have they changed? Or have I?"
“And that is how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.”
― Libba Bray, The Sweet Far Thing
