You are allowed to change

I always wanted to be one of those people who had a whiteboard on their dorm door, and while digging through the piles of people’s old discarded stuff in East Quad Residence Hall at the end of last semester, I found one. On move-in day this year, I proudly attached it to my door using two command strips and eventually wrote out my first poll: Joe’s or NYPD?

As I placed a tally under the NYPD column, my best friend, who lives down the hall, walked over and looked at what I was writing. When she saw what I had voted for, she said something that made me question my entire identity:

“NYPD? You’d always argue so much that Joe’s was better. You’ve changed.”

She wasn’t wrong. I used to insist that Joe’s Pizza was the best of the big three among my group of friends (Joe’s, NYPD and The Back Room), begging them to go there for a late-night bite after an outing to Cantina. But, by the time I voted in my own poll a week or so into this semester, NYPD had taken the crown.

Maybe it’s my newfound proximity to NYPD in comparison to my dorm last year in East Quad, just steps away from Joe’s, or the delectable baked ziti pizza that I like to pick the penne off of before biting into the actual slice. Maybe it was the guy behind the counter being so nice when I took my mom and brother there on Labor Day and told him they’d never been before. Maybe it’s the fact that all the friends I made second semester liked NYPD best because it was closest to West Quad and, therefore, the easiest to walk to. Maybe it was all the late night walks past the cube and up Maynard Street talking with my newfound family, or the time we all sat down together at one of the tables in the second room and watched, laughing, as one of them tackled the biggest calzone I’ve ever seen in my life. Maybe I have changed.

The more I look back at myself from a year ago, the more I see how much is different. I’m less afraid to talk to strangers. I like parties and going to the gym now. I keep more to myself. I listen to music for the sound sometimes, not just the lyrics. As I reflect, I wonder, is this change just me moving away from home and becoming independent, or is it a product of those around me?

To help me better understand this shift, I interviewed David Dunning, professor of psychology and the study of human understanding at the University of Michigan. He made a distinction between the physical and social qualities of our landscapes.  

“Most of the environment you’re surrounded by is really other people,” Dunning said.

While leaving home for college can be wonderful, terrifying, and exciting because of new places and possibilities, what’s bigger in forming our identities is our social circles — not the new environment itself. In our late teens and early 20s, many of us are in college, entering our first serious relationships, making our first serious career choices, nearing the end of the full development of our brains and meeting the people who will influence our lives forever.

Humans have an innate desire to fit in. It’s what Dunning called our “superpower” as a species — our ability to adapt in social situations. Not only are we trying to become more like those around us, but we also look to fill niches in our social groups and maintain a sense of individuality. Dunning explained that if one person is very talkative, the other has to be a listener to complement them. We may not notice it, but we fall into different roles depending on the social contributions of other people, constantly trying to balance distinctiveness with conformity.

I know this to be true. I’ve adapted to the groups I am part of, listening to the music they like, becoming invested in their favorite pastimes and walking with them to NYPD. I’ve also become a follower so they could lead us on a night out or in finding a room to watch the Super Bowl together, been a voice of reason laying next to them on a twin-XL mattress so they could be unreasonable about boys or homework and been an audience so they could preach to me about concepts they were passionate about. My identity has certainly been shaped by the people I’ve met.

In realizing that I’ve changed to be less like my family and my friends from high school and more like all of these people from an entirely different world, I began to fear that it was for the worse. Is it wrong to change? Perhaps a betrayal to those who love me as I am, or rather, as I was? I worry sometimes that I am moving further away from the people who are best for me and closer to those who may not be. I know that my closest friends from home have also changed since we graduated high school, but on the deepest level, where it matters, I love them just the same. Yet, I still worry that I might be leaving behind a better version of myself, or abandoning an important part of myself. I think sometimes change of the self can feel like a lie. 

“There are some psychologists and neuroscientists who argue that there really is no core self; that we’re so changeable and so flexible that it doesn’t make sense to talk about a core self,” Dunning said. 

In other words, you are just you, no matter how much you reinvent yourself; never the same, but always you. There’s a concept of identity that states that we adjust ourselves depending on who our audience is, presenting a different facet of ourselves determined by our current setting and basic personality traits. It’s called the working self. And when we’re at school, discovering new “working selves” as we find completely new audiences, we might experience a feeling that we are fundamentally different, but we’re really just frequently using these new presentations of ourselves. The you who you are with your mom or your best friends from high school is still within you. You’re just not using it.

Still, it sometimes feels like I’m not fully me. I worry that I am pulling too much of my identity from the people around me. Have I become too loud from all those nights sitting next to my friends and being the noisiest, most annoying people in the study space? Am I too selfish because of my one girlfriend who always tells me to choose my own happiness? I feel as though I can’t tell. There’s too much going on to keep tabs on every piece of my personality. Going through so much change has made me feel jarringly unfamiliar to even myself, and I get scared that these differences formed by my new friends are something I will regret.

 “When you’re young and also when you’re old, we spend a lot of time trying to figure ourselves out by comparing ourselves to other people… and I think people do that too much,” Dunning said. “What they should be doing is (asking) what are things I can try out? What could I be? Now compare yourself to other people and see what they’re doing, and maybe there’s something they’re doing that you could steal or try on for yourself. That is, don’t do social comparison for evaluation … do it for self improvement.”

Dunning’s words made me understand this voice in the back of my head telling me that even though I have changed and become more similar to my peers, I’m not betraying my past.  I’m simply slipping into place with the people around me. I’m collecting the pieces of life that they’ve uncovered on their own and shared with me, and using them to discover who I really am. I don’t need to be afraid of taking too many traits from the people I know or changing too much. All I need to do is ask myself this: Do I like who I’ve become?

After the Arkansas State game when a big group of us were hanging out together, one of my friends ordered a pizza from Joe’s and offered me a piece. The slice was huge and piping hot, with a delightfully thin crust, flavorful sauce and the perfect amount of mozzarella, stretching in a smile-inducing cheese pull as I took my first bite. In that moment, I started to think that maybe I do like Joe’s better — or maybe I just like who I am when I’m sitting next to the people I was eating it with.

Statement Columnist Audrey Hollenbaugh can be reached at aehollen@umich.edu. 

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