Last night I scrolled straight into a status I'd posted three years ago. I read it, and my face went hot. That rock-solid tone, reeking of someone barely twenty who was convinced she'd figured out all of life. I'd declared I would hate that genre of music forever, would never do that kind of job, would live and die by an opinion that, reading it back now, strikes me as... painfully naive.
My finger went up, ready to hit delete. Just to spare myself the embarrassment.
But I stopped. Because underneath the cringe, something else crept in, strange and oddly pleasant: huh, turns out I've traveled a long way from that person.
Why changing your mind is treated like a crime
I've noticed something a little absurd: the society I grew up in loves to praise the word "steadfast." The person who never wavers gets applause. The person who changes their stance gets labeled "wishy-washy," "blowing with the wind," "no convictions of their own."
It sounds right. But sit with it a moment and it starts to feel off.
Because if I know more today than I did yesterday — read a few more books, met a few more people, took a few more painful falls — then clinging to the exact same thinking I had three years ago is the thing that should worry me. It would mean that across three whole years, my head took in almost nothing new. Changing your mind, in a great many cases, isn't a sign of weakness. It's proof you're growing.
What people often mistake for steadfastness is, quite often, stubbornness in disguise. I've watched someone know full well they were wrong, yet argue to the bitter end, simply because they'd announced it to a crowd already and backing down would be humiliating. They'd rather own the mistake completely than endure one second of being seen as "having changed." That isn't backbone. That's pride behind the wheel.
Holding on to a belief you know is wrong, just because you're afraid of being called fickle — that's the real betrayal of yourself, not the changing of your mind.
Give yourself permission to take it back
Here's something I wish someone had told me sooner: you're allowed to take it back.
You have the right to have loved crowded, lively places yesterday and to crave a truly quiet corner today. The right to have lived and died for a relationship last year and to want nothing but to keep your head down, earn a living, and let your heart rest this year. The right to have been dead certain this was your field, then wake up one day knowing you belong somewhere entirely different.
None of that is betrayal. That's you updating yourself.
I like to think of a person as software. Nobody mocks an app for shipping an update. People only worry when it's stuck forever on an old, buggy version that refuses to be fixed. People are the same. Growing up, when you get down to it, is a string of tearing yourself down and building back up. Dropping a belief that no longer fits. Adding a perspective you just learned. The "me" of today should be a little different from the "me" of last year — if it's identical, that year was spent a bit wastefully.
And that old promise? That "I will forever..." I once typed out so confidently? It was written by someone with far less information than I have now. I don't owe that person blind loyalty. They already did their job: they carried me here, to this chair, grown enough to look back and smile.
There's an old line: no one steps in the same river twice. The water has moved on, and the person stepping in has changed too. I find that true in a way that's quietly freeing.
So that status from three years ago — in the end I decided not to delete it. I left it sitting there, like an old photo in an album. Not to torment myself, but to glance back now and then and know how far I've come.
Today's you has every right to shake their head at yesterday's you. That isn't losing, and it isn't spinelessness. It's growing up — in the truest sense of the words.