"I'm Terrified That I Might Never Have Met Me": Contemplating Continuers, Dividers and human's innate need for change
Sending a piece out into the universe that I wrote in October 2022 on a plane from New York to Austin, Texas and have edited since. The piece was inspired by Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker Article “Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?”, an article recently voted top 25 stories from The New Yorker in 2022.
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about my future. I always have but now, I think about it more. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I passed the one-year mark at work. Maybe it’s because I signed a new lease. Maybe because my friends are talking about their next steps. Seeking change seems to be addictive and endemic, so much so that when I ran into a colleague grabbing coffee at work and inquired to how she was doing, she responded: “Oh, not much. Just looking for my next thing.” I have always been unable to sit still, but now I feel I’ve caught the new strain.
Seeking change, I’ve learned recently, is an innately human instinct. Paul Skallas sums it up well in his blog: “We [humans] are evolutionarily wired to notice contrasts, not constants. Folk wisdom tells us ‘variety is the spice of life’ and ‘a change is as good as a rest’…variety maters…we’re happiest at a slightly high temperature moderated by a random, cooling breeze.”[1] People exist as themselves in a static moment and then, they intentionally alter.
Recently, Mark Koslow’s blog post, Noah Kahan’s song “Growing Sideways”, and Joshua Rothman’s New Yorker article have highlighted the duality of the human being, exposing the traces of past and future self in dialogue with your current state. Rothman grapples with the question: do humans change? And answers it by laying out two types of people: Continuers and Dividers. Continuers look at their lives as one continuous journey. They “have a strong sense of connection with their younger selves, and for them the past remains a home.” Continuers can remember things about their past Dividers can’t: childhood memories, what they were thinking last year. Meanwhile, Dividers see their lives as divided into separate slices. They “want to disconnect from their past selves, burdened by who they used to be or caged by who they are. They wish for multipart lives.” How do you tell which one you are? Simple, Rothman says: “Does the self you remember feel like you, or like a stranger? Do you seem to be remembering yesterday, or reading a novel about a fictional character?”
I can say with near certainty that I am a Continuer. I came into my personality at an early age. I lived a brief, immemorable life as a mute, shy girl from age zero to five, and then I, Kiera, appeared. Although I can’t remember the details of each year of life, I can remember me: what I was thinking, what I was doing, how I was feeling. My adolescent self has followed me through life like an old friend, and I am protective over her in a way no one seemed to be in her time. Subjected to a K-12 school that bulldozed individuality, I spent my middle school years creating Kiera and my high school years protecting her. And because she persisted, I feel warmth towards her – proud of her for the things she did, empathetic to the things she blustered. “Would your younger self be proud of who you are today?” Parker sometimes asks me. I nod because I know it to be true.
I hope to keep answering “yes” to that question my entire life. But I also know that if I remain in a static state, if I’m all heat and no breeze, eventually the answer will shift from affirmative to negative. “Possibilities multiply in our early decades, and later fade,” Rothman writes. Little Kiera expects Big Kiera to grab hold of the possibilities of life, to grow into herself instead of out of it, to change. So, change I will. But change how? I’m not sure.
Note: Title is a lyric from Noah Kahan’s song “Growing Sideways”.
[1] The Lindy Newsletter, September 2021 edition