Changing as an unchangeable person
2024-04-16 I don’t know if I have fundamentally changed the way that I think about change, not before in my life, at least not before this period of convalescence. I used to think that I was a person who could not change.
The tension between this thought and the idea of a constantly changing self is interesting to explore. Though I am confident that I am really not the same person that I was this morning, nor the morning before that, how much of that change is simply physiological or biological noise? How much can I attribute to the fact that I had a smoke and a drink the day before for a friend’s birthday in Brighton that’s clouding my head, I went to bed later than usual, I had too much dairy or caffeine, etc.? It would also not be incorrect for me to say that I am quite sensitive to the events around me, and that my internal state is often swayed by this noise. But that’s probably not what I mean to capture by invoking my self.
I do think that the accumulation of different experiences has some incremental effect in shaping my understanding of the world. But I’ve kept a lot of the interpreting frames through which I process different experiences for a very long time. I’ve just started recognizing those frames truly.
Determined yet indeterminable
If thoughts are a combination of frames and experiences, perhaps the recognition of those frames is the first step of recognizing the deterministic mold of thought. And maybe this is evidence of why it is still important to record and come back and reflect.
The image that comes to mind is the Korean game of yut. To grasp these contradictions, shake them out, see what patterns they make when they fall to the ground.
The requisites of change: agency
What is agency made up of? What is free will made up of?
forgiveness
Is someone really capable of trying again, changing, if you haven’t forgiven yourself in some way? Thinking that I was a person who could not change meant I was also not a person who could forgive themselves. There’s no redemption, there’s no possibility of doing anything differently, you’re the mistake-making and flawed person that you are, and there’s no escaping, even if that person is hellbound and cursed and bad. Maybe one prerequisite is that it no longer feels as unbearable to be alone with myself anymore.
Forgiveness is the desire to have a free will. Forgiveness is the desire to have nothing and to be nothing Forgiveness is the ability to start again. With yourself, with others. Forgiveness is the opposite of revenge. Forgiveness has no relation to the continuation of the relationship.
time
Is someone really capable of changing if they don’t give it time? Any kind of delayed gratification, maybe, necessitates the change of oneself or the change of the world around them. But it makes sense that, if those changes are to be more established, that they are also unlikely to be able to happen in a single moment. And being in the in-between is so painful and requires forgiveness over and over and over again, for being not-there-yet and even once you are there, you’re bound to slip because you’re human.
responsibility
Is someone really capable of change unless they can take responsibility for it? To recognize that there would be meaning behind the change in the first place? To change would mean having a different impact on the world, but you need to recognize what impact you can and have had on the world in the first place, whether good or bad.
Maybe the human recipe is just agency, though that’s made up of a lot of different things: the notion that you are someone who has an impact on the world, that you think that you can have a different impact, and the resilience towards making that effort even though it feels impossible sometimes.
continued conversation & content warning: what suicidal thoughts have to say about agency.