This is Your Green Light to Reinvent Yourself.

You can always reinvent yourself and redefine who you are

I am here to tell you that you can constantly reinvent yourself. However, there are risks involved. Yet, if you accept the challenge and the risks then, there’s nothing to it really but your own willpower and how wild you can dream.

This is how I would define Reinventing myself: It is the act of intentionally choosing who I am now, despite the past, while accepting with accountability all that I was before, and am today.

So, let your imagination run loose and give yourself a minute, maybe even a day to think about all the things you want to do and experience. Think about people you wish to meet, places you want to see and things you want to become good at.

Unpopular opinion: Reinventing yourself is Good for you

Let me first lay out the obvious for all of us here. Take a deep breath in!

You will die. I will die. We will all DIE. Crazy ha?

The scary thing about reinventing ourselves is that we are on some level dying, and then coming back to life as something slightly different/ maybe completely different too.

So why is it so unpopular in society to reinvent yourself? People shy away from encouraging each other to change their situations. Why do we scare each other from even trying?

One simple reason is because it means that people have to socially, mentally and psychologically REMOVE YOU FROM THE BOX they have fitted you in, and then FIND A NEW BOX to put you in. It means they need to -possibly- treat you differently, because people treat each other based on the boxes they allocate for each other. Values like respect, kindness, empathy, encouragement, tolerance and sincerity are not inherent in all social relationships. The truth is that most of our relationships are bound by some weird social meter of relating based on pride, selfishness and expectations.

People relate to one another usually by similarity, so if you manage to reinvent yourself, then those who have related to you before in your unhappiness have no more excuses to their unhappiness. People will have to deal with all the feelings of shame/regret/blame/ rejection….etc. Now honestly no body wants to do that constantly. CHANGE ironically triggers humans. Why? because it means things don’t stay the same forever. Why is that scary? Because it leads us to the utter inevitability of death being constantly present.

People die, situations change, relationships change…accepting that frees us into a state of REAL LIVING.

The Challenge in Reinventing Yourself

Some people might mistake reinvention with escape. Those two are not the same thing. When you feel called to reinvent yourself, the process is difficult because of the challenges that come with it. The difficulties include keeping your integrity and promises and staying accountable to all that you say and do. One does not simply step out of everything, and expect to be reborn. It is a romanticized notion, that we can just “walk away or escape”. Walking away with intention and integrity requires facing our lives, our truths and traumas; it is an act of healing.

Only when we are acknowledging all that is within us, can we really begin to create ourselves again; healthier and happier.

HUMANS ARE TERRIFIED OF THEIR OWN IMPERMANENCE

So what do we do?

We try to create permanence in the little things we have and practice. We treat our identities as unshakeable, unchanging and fixed things. Slowly, we become the job we do, the food we eat and the people we surround ourselves with. Unchecked, our thoughts become fixed, so do our values.

Don’t get me wrong, building little forms of security is commendable. The beauty of being human is the ability to create and nourish people, projects and homes. So why not do it all? Just without digging our nails into anything we create or nourish. Reinventing ourselves comes with the belief that we are fluid beings, with changeable attributes; capable of a lot more than we limit ourselves to believe.

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”
From the book “When Things Fall Apart, Pema Chodron”