Sometimes I do those personality quizzes that tell you what kind of animal you are and I find out I’m a hippo with the head of squirrel and the face of a cheetah and the back end of a long tailed lemur. Meanwhile the person next to me is just a cat. Then there’s those tests that assign you a number and it turns out I’m a borderline 7 with hints of a 3 combined with elements of a 12 and a bit of 32 thrown in for good measure.
It seems to be getting worse with age. When I was younger – like, really quite young – and we did quizzes in the backs of magazines – a phase the twelve year old is gleefully embracing – things seemed a little simpler. But by the time I was in my early twenties I was borderline practically everything on the Myers Briggs and recently I think I pretty much broke the Enneagram App.
Is it just me? Am I the only one with a fluid personality disorder? WHO AM I REALLY? Am I ever going to find out? (And if I don’t know, what hope does anyone else have?)
To my relief, I’ve been reading recently that researchers are discovering that our “selves” are far from fixed. The ‘me’ at the heart of me probably doesn’t really exist. I’m more a floating bundle of memories, thoughts, feelings and experience that I’m free to interpret and reshape in given contexts and environments so that I have a range of different me’s, depending on context, circumstance and time.
And this, actually, is a bit of a relief, don’t you think? We’re open to change. We can be responsive. There’s nothing about each of us that can’t be improved or modified or built upon.
Sure, there are a set of core beliefs, character traits and genetic features that are fairly central. Our temperaments – whether we’re optimistic or pessimistic, patient or impatient, a fast or slow processor etc – some of these things are fairly ingrained. But they don’t make up ‘me’: there’s no immovable, fixed entity that exists somewhere inside that needs to be uncovered.
Instead , we’re always being influenced by our experiences, learning, growing, changing in response to the people we’re with. The new field of neuroplasticity tells us that our very brain structure – connections between neurons and the like – changes all the time in response to pain, exercise, repetitive activities, stimulation (or the lack of it) and a whole host of other activities – most significantly including the way we think. FASCINATING STUFF! (Check out a quick explainer here) We are each a work in progress. Permanently.
Probably ten years after we got married I asked Doug what he liked about me when we first got together. “I liked your flexibility.” he replied. (Stop smirking. Not that kind of flexibility…)
At the time it seemed a rather unromantic answer. These days, I kinda like it. Flexible. Work in progress. Always changing and developing.
Is there anything more encouraging than that at the start of the New Year?
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