Death and taxes, sure—but what about adding change to Benjamin Franklin’s famous list of certainties? It’s basically there, anyway. After all, even if you stayed in one house and met nobody but your family from the day you were born to the day you died, your body would age, your brain would mature and you would, naturally, end up different from how you started. Such inevitability can be hard to accept. Humans like familiarity and routine; the very promise of change can feel—Franklin notwithstanding—threateningly close to accepting that we are all marching towards the grave.
No wonder, then, that so much self-help literature is dedicated to coping with change—especially of the kind that comes with loss, ageing and routine setbacks. As a foundational prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous puts it: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Being able to cope with change and stasis is, you might argue, the key to contentment and happiness.
Because even as we so often long for certainty, we also seek the courage to change as people. We spend half our lives building our self and the other half dismantling it, whether on the therapist’s couch, in the gym or with blind optimism every January. The promise of change gives us purpose and hope as much as it threatens loss and terror. It is this kind of intentional change that most interests the author and New York Times writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis, whose new book, You’ve Changed: The Promise and Price of Self-Transformation, interrogates “the possibility and mystery of change, and the fear and doubt it can awaken in ourselves and each other”.
The book has been in the making for several years, and Denizet-Lewis casts his net widely in his quest to understand the possibilities of change, speaking to therapists of every description and, most importantly, those who have undertaken projects of self-transformation themselves. These include trauma patients and trans people, prison reformers and name-changers, epiphany-havers and psychonauts (one 23-year-old found a DMT trip “rewired” him “in an instant”: he stopped being gay and started supporting Trump). It soon becomes clear that the processes behind transformation are gateways to much bigger questions about the fixed or unfixed nature of self, about nature and nurture, about the parts of us that are malleable and the parts that aren’t. The underlying inquiry of the book is both simple and huge: what makes us who we are?
The son of breathwork teacher and author Dennis Lewis, Denizet-Lewis has clearly been wracked with questions about the nature of existence since he was young and is heavily inspired by his father’s work. That’s fitting because the fundamental tenet of psychotherapy, one of the most common methods of seeking change, is that our childhoods shape who we become as adults. In order to change, we—like Denizet-Lewis—must retrace our steps and interrogate our beginnings. Our personalities are formed by our experiences and environments; if the self can be made, then it can also be unmade. (Similarly, nowadays, we can continually make and unmake selves online: Denizet-Lewis references the influencer Oli London, who in 2021 declared himself nonbinary and “trans-Korean”, then, over the next three years, came out as a transgender woman, then detransitioned, then denounced transracialism, then converted to Catholicism, then styled himself as a war correspondent in Israel.)
Yet the deeper the trauma, the harder change can be. Crisis “can fracture identity and harden survival into a permanent way of being”, writes Denizet-Lewis. That said, he meets Helen, a woman trying to change at age 82, whose “volatile personality” caused her “heartache and chaos”, and sits in on her hypnotherapy sessions. While she has clearly maintained some of her chaos, her therapy team tell Denizet-Lewis that she has gradually “developed new coping strategies”.
You’ve Changed shows us that deceptively tidy aphorisms about dogs, tricks, leopards and spots are all a matter of perspective. While some people Denizet-Lewis interviews are determined to believe that people simply are who they are (including the former schoolteacher of a man who was once the class bully and now presents as a gentle Buddhist), others are convinced that all change takes is a little openness to the idea that it’s possible. “When you really come to accept that your sense of self is at least partially a distortion, a projection, and just one of many possibilities, then you have a great opening for change,” says the psychologist Andrew Twardon, director at the Center for Intensive Treatment of Personality Disorders in New York. The science is there to back it up: studies show that cognitive behavioural therapy changes neural activity surrounding emotions and decision making, literally rewiring your brain. Denizet-Lewis also highlights how psilocybin, derived from magic mushrooms, can create lasting change by “loosening entrenched thought patterns” over time. Anecdotally, the SSRIs used to treat depression can help people see that the state they’re in isn’t fixed and immutable, and that they are capable of thinking and feeling differently.
There is a touch of cart before horse to all this; many of these examples suggest that you are what you do. So much modern self-help—including the “optimisation” content that bombards us relentlessly online, about everything from fitness to finding your life’s purpose—posits that we can decide to form new habits and, by going through the motions, change incrementally. This is true to an extent—and helps everyone from the self-help guru Eckhart Tolle to cosmetics companies flog their wares. Start noticing the present moment, and you’ll become more present. Start gelling your eyebrows, and you’ll become more polished. Start drinking protein shakes, and you are now a person who drinks protein shakes. But are you the sort of person who drinks protein shakes? And would that mean you had become a different person, deep down?
A woman previously known as Ellen Cooperman changed her name to ‘Cooperperson’ on the basis of… well, you can imagine
Some of the name-changers whom Denizet-Lewis speaks to certainly take this top-down approach: a woman previously known as Ellen Cooperman changed her name to “Cooperperson” on the basis of… well, you can imagine. “I had more confidence, more assurance,” she told Denizet-Lewis. “My new name changed me.” Yet quick-fix change can also prove addictive. Denizet-Lewis refers to a few people in the mould of Oli London, who constantly follow new iterations with newer ones, whose transformations never quite satisfy them, who seem to be uncomfortable with holding onto anything for too long. One is another name-changer, who has, over the years, legally called himself Snaphappy Fishsuit Mokiligon, Fuck Censorship, Fuck the Drug War, Variable and N***** (unstarred). Drew, Denizet-Lewis’s guide for a mushroom trip, has some insight: “What’s easier than exploring the unknown is lurching towards a new identity.” Such compulsive change seems only to have the illusion of freedom; when your whole life is centred on constant transformation, you are still clinging to a kind of rigidity.
Striving for change by going through process after process is one thing; finding yourself suddenly changed by a thought or single experience is quite another. Esalen, a spiritual centre in California where Denizet-Lewis’s father has taught breath workshops, is a temple for epiphanies. One leader there says that her life is “the result of… what might be understood as lightning strikes of insight and epiphany”, such as the moment when, as a teen meth addict, she heard a voice telling her to get help. (I was reminded, in a lightning-strike of my own, of the actress Jemima Kirke, who remarked, during one of her famous Instagram Q&A sessions, “I don’t trust epiphanies or people who have them.”)
Denizet-Lewis describes the eureka moment of realising he is gay. “I heard a voice that sounded like it was coming from both inside and outside of me,” he writes. The realisation “changed [his] life and identity in an instant”. I don’t doubt it. But did it change who he is fundamentally? That seems less certain. A realisation about one’s sexuality is generally understood not as a change, per se, but as an unlocking of something that’s already there; indeed, Denizet-Lewis describes how queer people coming out to their families often soften the news by “presenting identity as an unveiling rather than a remaking”. So too with trans people: transition is not framed as changing who you are, but as becoming who you are.
So perhaps it’s fair to say that we can change our emotional worlds, but we cannot change our fundamental selves—although this distinction is premised on an uncomfortably blurry line, and no one in the history of philosophy has yet found a neat solution. Denizet-Lewis is understandably perturbed when he meets a former colleague from a queer magazine who has since claimed not to be gay (indeed, he is now, apparently, fundamentally anti-gay), yet he is himself wisely ambivalent about identifying as “an addict”, even as he openly talks about his struggles with sex addiction in his twenties. “When a diagnosis becomes an identity, it can be hard to give up and can serve as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy,” he writes. Of course, sometimes a self-fulfilling prophecy is just what we need. Sometimes the horse needs to be pulled by the cart.
A resistance to change can signal illiberalism on both a personal level—why stay the same, when you can be anyone, do anything?—and a political one. Conservatives naturally distrust change, valuing tradition and historic ideas over progressive new ones. There is a sense that change means capitulation to corrupting or diluting forces. Changing the country in favour of immigrant values would mean we had lost something of the true Britain. “Make America great again” is a slogan that weaponises voters’ distrust of change, promising not to make things better by forging ahead, but to put them back to how they were. Incidentally, Donald Trump prides himself on his consistency: “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same person,” he told his biographer in 2014. “The temperament is not that different.” (The jokes really do write themselves.)
All of which synthesises how our capacity and desire for change is intertwined with our need for control. Fritz Perls, the founder of Gestalt therapy, wrote that “any intention towards change will achieve the opposite”; that “change happens when one becomes what he is, not when he tries to become what he is not”.
“I was grateful that, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t desperate for a solution,” writes Denizet-Lewis of how he felt after his mushroom trip, in which he hallucinated several doors and chose the one marked “change”. Trying to change is itself the pursuit of a certain outcome; whereas, almost paradoxically, accepting things as they are is welcoming the possibility they might change in ways we cannot prepare for.
“People change, and they stay the same,” Denizet-Lewis writes, three quarters of the way through a book that readers might think will eventually come down on one side or the other. But, by this point, I’m not sure that these two seemingly opposite states are as different as they seem. What You’ve Changed teaches us is that, more important than being certain of either, is having the wisdom to spot the difference.
