Each year world’s population spend billions of dollars on self-improvement books, workshops, coaching, and stress-management programs to be superior, more tolerant, viable, compassionate, and charismatic version of themselves. But besides the speculations on what drives individuals to alter, there is a more crucial point argued by psychologists: can identity indeed be changed over time? There are often great hypotheses, but what does it mean in real life?
Personal identity is the concept you develop about yourself that advances throughout your life. This may incorporate perspectives of your life have no control over, such as where you developed up or the color of your skin, as well as choices you make in life, such as how you spend your time and what you accept. You show portions of your identity through what you wear and how you connected with other people. Identity can be changed due to the factors such as the aging process, sudden comprehension, life difficulties, the society in which a person lives, inspiration from successful people, and medical intervention, but some people confess these changes, referring that identity can’t be changed throughout the lifespan as we have same body and memories.
First of all, the changes in adolescence affect your personal identity and values by influencing you to reconsider and sometimes change who you are, and change your thoughts and opinions about certain things. It is all about growing up, and when we grow up, we experience new things, and sometimes we rethink our views or opinions about them. This process can often influence us to compare ourselves to others and become more like them, or can sometimes lead us to regret who we are because of what we see from others. Also, it may make us feel that we do not belong and that we need to change our identity to improve ourselves. However, this isn’t always the case. Adolescence just helps us to explore who we are, and to try things differently to see the final result, explore new things, and try something new. It leads us to face new challenges in our lives and allows us to see new possibilities and take new opportunities. Throughout adulthood, personal identity is reshaped because as our own body grows, we grow along with it. We become more mature and consider more things. For example, our appearance, choices, and decisions. During the aging process, we value things more suitable to our age and gender. For example, when you were four of five your favorite band may have been ‘The Pussycat Dolls'. But as you got older, you became interested in other things more suitable to your older age group, so you may have changed your opinion about these singers and prefer a band more categorized with your age group, for example, Jennifer Lopez. The point of this is that at certain stages in our lives, we may like something for a particular period, but as we get older our values begin to change, depending usually on how old we are, our gender, and the kind of publicity we are exposed to focusing on a particular person or thing.
Another interesting point is that comprehension of personality could be suddenly in a specific moment of life. It can be either identified at an early age or throughout the difficulties. The following statement can be exemplified in ‘The coming-of-age con’, where is the part about Salinger’s novel ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ where Holden cries with gladness because of learning what he wants from life just by looking at his sister’s happiness. As a result of the emotional boom, the novel’s hero found himself and it will help him to be part of society. A similar story happens with the fact that the main characters understand their thoughts mainly in the climactic moments. By the end, they ‘grow up’ and realize their own place in life.
What’s more, we are influenced much by the society we are in, and the people we are around. Society plays a huge role in the things we value because of what we are exposed to at certain times. Our personality can and will be impacted by the physical environment we find ourselves in, and the combination creates changes in our personality. Social roles matter, too. As someone becomes more invested in a job, they often become more conscientious; likewise, when someone becomes more invested in a long-term relationship, they tend to become more emotionally stable and have higher self-esteem. The more commitment is part of a person’s identity in any context, the more it appears to cause personality change.
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Life difficulties faced by a person also can impact personal traits. Especially, betrayal, loss of a family member, and distend tend to change a person’s behavior and way of thinking. Most people passed through betrayal think about why this unpleasant situation happened and why that person did that. So, he or she will start to analyze everything and come up with the solutions, such as being more careful with people and being nimble. When it comes to the loss of a family member, depression for some period of time is inevitable. After sorrow, a person often reconsiders aspects of his/her life, leading him or her to be more serious and responsible. Usually, suffering from not curable illnesses such as cancer, and HIV/AIDS makes a person think about the real values of life and his/her attitude to life. For instance, a person who is always rude and nervous may transform into the type of person who is happy to live just another day of his or her life thanks to God.
Even so, personality change or transformation due to high ambitions is possible because individuals respond to their environments. Individuals may also want to change their personalities. Personality researchers are now beginning to address important questions about the possibility of lasting personality changes through intervention efforts. For example, when someone wants to be successful, he will try to change his or her habits, and approach to life. Probably, an inspired person will start to go to seminars, business trainings, or maybe will start to read books related to self-development. They will also learn and try to catch something from the lives of billionaires, such as Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
Nowadays, identity can be changed with the help of medicine. What I want to say is that person refers to plastic surgery, which will after give him or her self-confidence. In ‘The Pitfalls of Plastic Surgery', Camille Paglia states that “good surgery discovers and reveals personality; bad surgery obscures and distorts it”. The most popular reason for having cosmetic treatment is to improve self-esteem and ‘to look as good as I feel’. Plastic surgery is also a great opportunity to feel more confident for people ashamed of their appearance, for example, because of a car crash or a fire accident. Besides the fact that there is not still full information about side effects, plastic surgery gives hope for a better life to people around the world.
On the other hand, some people suggest that personal identity persists over time because a person occupies the same body from birth to death. It is true because numerically a person is dealing with the same physical body. But it is not like an individual consists of all of the same identical aspects that he/she had when he/she was born. All cells of the body biologically replace every 5 years, and red blood cells only live about 4 months before they are cycled out, even the skeleton is regularly being remodeled. So, a person is constantly being replaced by new physical versions of himself/herself. For instance, 35-year-old Sam, Andrew’s mother, has a car crash and was seriously injured. In order to keep her alive, doctors have to remove her uninjured brain from her skull and transplant it into the body of a 21-year-old African girl who recently died from a brain tumor. The operation was successful. In this situation, would you tell Andrew that his mother was still alive?
John Locke believed that identity persists over time because you retain memories of yourself at different points, and each of those memories is connected to one before it. Let’s imagine that you are at a school reunion 10 years later and you wanted to know whether someone was the same person as you remember 10 years ago. To know this, a conversation with that person and talking about past memories from school is enough. If the person recalls those moments, you would conclude it is the same person. But there is a problem: if personal identity requires a memory, then none of us became who we are until our first memory.
Differentiating from the past to become whom you want to be is neither a matter of conforming to old identities nor rebelling against them, but of finding our own way. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. On a typical and emotional level, changing our sense of identity can feel like we’re breaking the bond or illusion of connection or merger with our origin where the identity was formed. It can feel like a kind of companionship or connection to keep distinguishing ourselves in terms of our old identity, and there’s a core resistance to forming an improved image of ourselves and making a new way of living. It’s frightening to alter and assume a new identity that’s more positive. It takes a lot of courage, understanding, knowledge, and persistence, but not eventually we got to take control if we want to live our life.
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