Never Say Never

One of the more inconvenient things about announcing that you’ll never do something is eventually wanting to do it. You were never going to download the dating apps again, become a runner, leave the city, or be the person who spends Saturday morning at the farmers market. You hated gold jewelry, thought Pilates was boring, didn’t understand why anyone would willingly host Thanksgiving, and had a surprisingly strong opinion about bangs. Then, annoyingly, you changed your mind.

There’s something funny about finally feeling like you know yourself, only to discover that some of the information is already out of date. You’ve accumulated preferences, boundaries, opinions, and a fairly detailed sense of what is and isn’t for you. You know your people, your taste, the things you’ll spend money on, and the things you’ve confidently sworn off forever. It would be convenient if all of that stayed accurate, but knowing yourself doesn’t prevent you from changing.

We get attached to our own lore

At some point, preferences become stories we tell about ourselves. I’m not a morning person. I hate running. I could never live there. I’m terrible at cooking. I don’t want a big wedding. I would never date someone like that. Some of these things are deeply true; others have simply been repeated enough times that we stopped checking.

Your friends don’t make changing your mind any easier because they remember everything. It’s hard to quietly revise an opinion when the group chat has three years of evidence that you once held the opposite position with extraordinary conviction. The woman who made fun of pickleball may eventually have to explain why she now owns a paddle. This is the price of personal growth in the screenshot era.

New information is allowed

Of course, not every changed mind is funny or inconsequential. The job you thought you wanted can feel different once you have it. A relationship can change what you imagined for yourself. You can spend years wanting to live somewhere and then find yourself scrolling listings somewhere completely different. You might discover that you want more ambition than you did two years ago, or that the version of success you were chasing isn’t nearly as appealing now that you can see it up close.

None of this requires deciding that your former self got it wrong. We make choices based on the lives we can imagine at the time, and then we get more information by actually living them. It would be strange if experience never changed the answer.

There are still things you don’t know about yourself

The better you know yourself, the more surprising it can be to discover something new. There are still people you haven’t met, places you haven’t been, things you haven’t tried, and entire interests you currently think sound terrible.

Knowing yourself doesn’t have to mean becoming increasingly certain about everything. There’s plenty of self-knowledge in being able to recognize when an old opinion no longer fits and move on without making it a referendum on who you used to be. Your friends may pull up the receipts, but that’s what the group chat is for.