Changing positions

As a child I gained strong ideas strongly held and clung deeply to them. That’s fine. It’s good to develop an identity and build beliefs around it—to a point. Not necessarily because those beliefs are right in the objective sense, but because childhood requires having a sense of who we are.

As a teenager I modified my thoughts as new information came in, and began molding my views into something that resembled the type of person I believed to be. It wasn’t perfect, but it was good enough to help me navigate the world. Looking back I was also incredibly wrong in many areas.

As a young adult those views started to shift, and I needed to find an anchor to hold to, something to figure out if the me inside was still the same.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve found that center, that me, that person I’m most satisfied with being. And I’ve grown comfortable with shedding much of the rest as needed.

My being, along with my knowledge of the world, grew at incredible rates through adolescence. With each major change I reached a point where I was willing to shift my views radically based on the whims of a single person who entered my sphere. I was impressionable, excited to make friends and be recognized, and at times shifted drastically to mirror the people I met.

At some point we can’t keep shifting that much. Now I am still willing to shift, because I don’t want to atrophy. I want to always be willing to allow new information to come in, to change me, to prove I was wrong, to become a better version of myself. But the changes are more incremental, by necessity. The me that’s been built up has more data associated with it, so growth by percentage has to be smaller.

With that said, now that I have my center, I’m less afraid of change, less afraid that a single new bit of information would so overwhelm me as to sweep away everything that came before. In that sense I’m now more open to new data, and often embrace it.