You are who you aren't anymore

Straddling the ravioli ravine with a Nashville musician to wonder about the cost of becoming yourself.

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I took an Italian cooking class in Rome two weeks ago and learned to make pasta from scratch. It was a great format - a group of us made pasta together, then enjoyed it for dinner with wine and dessert.

I hit it off with the guy next to me. Brad, a musician, was travelling with his flight attendant sister. They both live in Nashville now, but they were raised in Alabama, in exactly the Southern way you might imagine. Very religious, with complex morality and strict rules. Brad didn’t drink until he was 24, was a virgin until he was 29, and laboured under guilt and shame until his mid 30s. It was then he started to ask questions, do some inner work and examine the beliefs he’d taken for granted.

Why yes I did make this fettuccine thank you for asking

Now 40, Brad has retrained as a therapist. Brad hasn’t abandoned his faith entirely, but he feels jaded about how religion has been weaponised in the US and he is disappointed in the politics of many of his church-going family and friends. The people he grew up with, he explained quietly, aren’t interested in his personal transformation. He channels his empathy and curiosity into helping his clients challenge restrictive assumptions and beliefs. He loves his work, but mourns the distance with his family and friends.

Stories like Brad’s remind me of the ravine analogy from Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari. McGarvey talks about what happens when we mobilise away from our class of origin and never quite reach the other side. You become a diaspora of one, out-of-place no matter where you go. You’re not so much stuck between income brackets as stuck between value systems. What you care about, and how you see the world, changes.

This rings true beyond social class - immigrants, second language speakers, people who leave their religions or have different politics to their parents, or even people who change professions face the same challenges.

Brad and I talked about some of the stories that shape our lives, and agreed that religion is, at least, reassuringly identifiable. The dogma is recorded, the rules written down, and you can draw straight lines between systems, stories, and self. Other belief systems, just as powerful, can be more difficult to trace, or even to identify. So much of what we think, believe, or internalise as personality traits are products of our culture. They’re things our parents said, stories we absorbed in the media, attitudes of our peers in high school, or unchallenged assumptions we don’t realise we have.

Poking at these things can be uncomfortable, and we risk unravelling the whole nest - our identities, values, relationships, traditions, even our daily lives. Value shifts create a kind of exile. Not because you’ve left a place, but because you’ve left a way of seeing the world. Once we start asking questions, the veil is torn and it can be hard to stop.

Sometimes the outcomes are revolutionary: activism, political action, peer influence. More often, they’re internal: self-knowledge, values alignment, personal change. The internal should generally happen first.

“You are no use to any family, community, cause or movement unless you are first able to manage, maintain and operate the machinery of your own life.”

- Darren McGarvey, Poverty Safari: Understanding the anger of Britain’s underclass

An unexamined life, according to Socrates, is not worth living. He was willing to die for that belief. Most of us don’t risk death for our life changes, but we do risk things when we start asking questions: relationships, identity and certainty. Self-improvement gets a good rap, but we don’t often talk about the costs, and they can be high. You might be a better you, but do you have people that get you? Belonging and safety are two core human needs, and putting them on the line is no small deal.

After a tricky few years of swimming in the unknown, Brad feels better about himself and his contribution to the world. He’s making new friends and building new relationships. He knows his people by shared values and vibe - which is probably why he feels more in common with a Kiwi chick he met folding ravioli than the guys he went to high school with. But he confesses to a pervasive sense of loneliness. Those early relationships are important, and disconnection from his roots is disorienting.

In A Nation of Shopkeepers, Dan Evans argues that “class consciousness and identity is very often about defining oneself negatively. We know who we are by what we are not.” Which I guess means we’re not just made by where we’ve come from, but also by what we’ve left behind. Brad isn’t just a therapist and musician from Nashville - he’s someone who’s left behind religious dogma, conservative politics, and the belief and identity systems that accompany that.

Some of us are a long way from where we come from - in geography, religion, lifestyle, class, politics or beliefs - while others are tweaked editions of the original. Either way, all of us are a product of not just the choices, but the changes we’ve made.

You’re not just who you are today, you’re who you’ve decided not to be anymore. You’re the result of what you’ve challenged, shifted, and left in the past. The habits you’ve broken, the stories you’ve stopped telling yourself, and the ideas you’ve changed your mind about. These are the nuances of you.

I reckon that’s something to be proud of, even if it sometimes feels lonely. Because what else do you want to do? Sit there and be the same person your whole life?

Maybe. But you probably didn’t read this far if that’s your vibe.

Til next week,

AM

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