Reinvention: an unavoidable skill we might as well hone into art

Little inspires or daunts as much as the premise that it is possible to change. If today is not going your way–well, up until a certain point, you have tomorrow to try again. Tomorrow you can be different. If not a wholly different person, at least yourself, but better. Kinder and more industrious, perhaps. That’s how it often feels to me, at least. If I’m honest, the lure of reinventing myself can become a powerful distraction, sending me off on unhelpful tangents, even while the concept itself remains enticing.

In the West, I think many of us cling to the concept of reinvention. It’s the gleaming promise that implicitly glides along beneath the grit of our everyday lives – if something isn’t working, just change. Make yourself anew. Try again. There is something encouraging about this mindset, but there is something oppressive, too. Reinvention can seem like a burdensome obligation just as much as it can conjure up renewal. If you’re not doing well enough, after all, who do you have to blame but yourself? Simply do something different.

But how? Who should I be? That is one of the stings of reinvention, that a fresh self seems glimpsable in the mirror, but also feels more distant than a blue moon. Hard enough to be my faltering self – now I need to become someone more successful? Faced with thoughts like that, I feel myself crumple, becoming curled and spiny and resistant. No. I prefer the fantasy, that one day things will be as I will; I prefer not to have to change, because so often it hurts so very much to be forced into a different shape. That’s how I think, at least, when I’m feeling more easily overwhelmed.

Yet how dare we not fulfill our potential? We are constantly urged to change; we’re nudged to the 9th degree. We scramble desperately to fit into a different skin or at least shed the old one. The skin, however, remains. Even if the cells within your body regrow every seven years, the process somehow leaves you with many of your core ways of being intact. Which, depending on how you look at it, is a reassuring relief or a styming realization. 

Reinvention, it turns out, does not reinvent itself often. It’s been with us throughout the centuries. Always a beckoning glint of promise, always a wrenching obligation. Over and over, life forces the issue. How we deal with the need to change becomes what measure of choice is left to us. As these authors demonstrate, there are many ways to seek reinvention (or perhaps spurn it altogether).

5 BOOKS ON HOW TO START ALL OVER

Learn to accept yourself with Woman Running in the Mountains by Yūko Tsushima

So Tshushima wrote this novel in the ‘70s, long before Japanese society was necessarily prepared to dwell on the autonomy of single mothers. Thanks to being recently reissued, many of Tshushima’s books have wandered into the hands of new readers who still resonate with her treasured themes: the luminous everyday, the melancholy woven through the hours, the small cruelties it takes to keep going. Her lead characters are dog-paddling in relatively overlooked corners, gasping for breath in seas of indifference and casual oppression. These books, however, typically do not feel heavy. She makes room for cups of barley tea or a beam of sunlight; her narrators’ skins tingle with pleasant sensations just as much as their minds scrabble for refuge.

In this selection, main character Takiko Odaka finds she is pregnant but lacks any plan for what to do next. She finds little support from her family or from society. Yet she steadfastly insists on raising the child herself, despite how much that bucks the cultural flow.

“She made her way along the street with her shoulders back and head high.  In the three months or more since her size had been noticeable, Takiko had never once walked along the alley with her head down.  Even on rainy days, when there were puddles everywhere, she hadn’t lowered her eyes.  She refused to lower her eyes before “the neighbours” – those people who had made Takiko a sorrow to her mother because her mother cared what they thought.  She felt that by holding herself in this way she was directly supporting the fetus inside her.”

With refreshing candor, Tshushima does not turn Takiko’s baby into a refuge, either, but brings up the noise and mess, the inconvenience and the cost of an infant’s relentless dependency. Takiko is heavy, is sweating, is tired but is herself. This is a book, in a way, of dust and gray, dappled only occasionally with joy.

Takiko reinvents herself slowly, not in the triumphal twitches of movie montages, but in the steady flow of tedious time. Tsushima lets her characters suffer ambiguity, wondering both what they want and if it is possible to attain it. She shows the red pain of having a child along with the sweltering, smothering nature of needing to care and to keep caring without enough support – she shows, in other words, the way the obligation to care can push people into absolute exhaustion. As with many of Tsushima’s other books, this is a story of grit and grittiness, precarity and meager, precious moments. Reinvention may, yes, happen in those moments, but for me this is a novel that succeeds in relating how reinvention is more of an unfolding process, and not even a fully intentional process at that.

Where’s the bibliography?

The way we often view things in the West, reinvention is an intentional act. You pick who you want to be next and charge. You fake; you make. You ride, shining and made-over, into the sunset of happily ever after. 

As Tsushima hints, however, reinvention often happens despite ourselves. It can unfold outside our comprehension; it can be a trail without a known destination or even landmarks. A therapist might say that when life seems to be forcing you into uncomfortable situations, to seek acceptance and commitment therapy. Practice letting in the discomfort; practice, as Takiko does, feeling the world rub you down into docile dullness. Practice keeping yourself spiky inside. Learn to enjoy your own flavor, the smell of your own sweat, the particular bent your mind takes. 

Practice being enough. This is not easy. What I gain from Tsushima’s characters, however, is that it’s OK to notice loveliness, and that it’s also OK to feel intensely prickly, discomfiting emotions, too. The two can coexist as part of the fullness of you; you do not have to tamp down the awareness of your own frustrations. I struggle sometimes with my own irritation, my own sandpapery boredom or aggravated dissatisfaction. I have been working so hard–can’t I have at least a small reward? Can’t I be more gracious? Holding these emotions is like holding a frustrated hedgehog. There’s a lot of squirming and spines. Cradle a hedgehog long enough, however, and it often lapses into calmness. The disquiet passes. 

There’s a relief in not straining toward more pleasant things. It can be redemptive, I think, to shelter frustration and unsureness for a while. There’s a loveliness in just letting yourself be who you actually are, even in the midst of reinvention.

A little more

• Read this lovely interview between Annie Ernaux and Yuko Tsushima, in which they discuss the importance of the everyday 
• Explore more of Tsushima’s oeuvre, perhaps starting with Territory of Light
• Learn about Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for getting through weird transitions

Contemplate tech-driven reinvention with Exhalation by Ted Chiang

When contemplating reinvention, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to stay fixated on a carbon-based existence without peering a few elements over to wonder what silicon and other complementary elements might add to the experience of being human. As Chiang amply points out, we may soon be more bionic; we are already finding ourselves capable of forming relationships with non-carbon-based forms of existence. 

Some label Chiang’s work ‘sci-fi’–his is the story, after all, behind the adaptation of Arrival–but his work remains rooted mostly in earthly interpretation and permutations, even if hard science concept do eventually poke their muzzle into the crack of the door and howl a little. 

One story, for example, toys with the idea of planned obsolescence, vaulting the concept into a question about relationships. Should certain relationships be slated for retirement, too? Are we becoming disappointed in ourselves, he seems to ask, for being so slow at reinvention and so set in our non-silicon ways? Why can’t we just 2.0 ourselves more often?

Asymmetries also attract Chiang’s attention, particularly relational asymmetries, such as the relationship between a parent and a child. Power dynamics shift in these kinds of relationships; reinventions are frequent, calling into question our assumptions about the immutability of our characters while also highlighting how much of what makes us “us” depends on the specific situation. 

“If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task. You can’t assemble an equivalent collection of heuristics in less time; experience is algorithmically incompressible.”

While Chiang’s views are not always optimistic or cheering, neither are they obsessed with digital dregs or with mucking about in a techno-apocalypse. They speak, rather, of caution, of the need to adopt the new while still considering the whole. Freshness, novelty and the like are not always better, and maybe reinvention can take many forms, one of which might, paradoxically, be deciding not to change in certain ways. Perhaps your reinvention is a splitting away from values like hustle culture; perhaps it is more of a distillitation as you hew closer to what forms your core.

Where’s the bibliography?

There’s an awareness humming within each story that calls us to awareness about our own decisions and the degree of deliberateness we bring to our own lives. Much as our culture urges us to buy and break and buy again, Chiang whispers that some things remain irreplaceable, that silicon does not solve everything, and that technological wonders may dazzle, but may just as well usher in debates and concerns we’ve considered before without adequately solving. Nothing is new under the sun, he would probably agree with Solomon, and yet our little stabs at reinventing our world through technology still compels. 

“Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.“

The bibliotherapy lies, I think, in learning to ask yourself what values technology adds to your life and what things it subtracts. Are you making a good bargain, gaining more than you are giving up? Are you sure? Short of issuing answers, Chiang lets us readers determine the perils and pleasures of pushing ever deeper into an ever more advanced world that nonetheless remains tethered to our limited, biological selves with all their weaknesses, non-binary emotions, and squishy flesh. Tempting as it might be to try to make yourself a better, more bionic being, could it be possible that simply being human, warts and all, is enough? Furthermore, you can also ask yourself what problems you may be trying to solve with technology that could be better addressed otherwise. Technology is unlikely to be the answer, for example, for fixing certain relationships or even for helping us find and navigate relationships in the first place. What might be a better, more original approach? When does seeking a “new” and shining solution pay off, and when does it simply land you back in a familiar, disappointing place? 

From Chiang we can take, perhaps, the courage to be our carbon-based selves, muddling along as best we may, while still dreaming of other lives in other places and other circumstances. Our dreams are what often shape us, and yet it’s possible for us to weave new dreams, too.

A little more

• Chiang’s story is behind the well-liked 2016 movie Arrival
• The Believer interviews Chiang
• Check out an online story from Chiang

Learn to release your dreams with Uncommon Measure by Natalie Hodges

Here we have a glowing sequin of a book, one of those memoirs that just keeps on scintillating with openness, vulnerability, and nuanced insight. For those who love neuroscience, it’s particularly engaging (if it were up to me, we would have many more nonfiction books that straddle the intersections of personal experience, scientific underpinnings, and healthy curiosity). And as much as Hodges’s account is solidly grounding, it’s also quietly shattering. It hurts to even think about relinquishing a much-treasured dream. That is precisely what Hodges was trying to force herself to do, however, while writing.

It’s one D minor chord; it’s not that difficult; I can feel the shadow of it in my fingertips. But I can’t bring myself to draw the bow. It’s like when you want to tell someone how you feel but don’t quite have the words, and you swallow into silence because you are afraid of what you might say, of how you might dismay and astonish yourself.

A violinist since childhood, Hodges developed an abiding love for music and for rhythm’s ability to touch us deeply. But she began to find herself faltering on the sweltering surface that is a performance stage. With every unfortunate scrape of her bow, she could feel herself being forced to unpeel herself from the intensity of the quest to become a professional musician. I don’t, honestly, know how she accomplishes this unpeeling at all, much less manages it with the honesty and grace she exhibits. 

Rather than rage at all her wasted time and embittered hopes, Hodges tells us about famous composers. She reflects on Bach’s humility and tendency to compose for multiple instruments rather than one star player. She addresses how it feels to notice desire transfiguring itself inside her, how her ambitions go slant-wise and point her toward other aims. In a culture that treasures narratives of reaching one’s ambitions at nearly any cost, Hodge’s story reminds us how meaningful it is to think about reinvention as a process of relinquishment, too. Not failure so much as change, albeit complicated, aching change. A new rhythm in a world teeming with rhythms to which we often unconsciously but very literally conform.

It’s easy to look at all of the time and effort I put into becoming a professional violinist and think that it was wrong or false or that it wasn’t “real.” I felt like I had been on this false path and there was actually some other thing I should have been pursuing the whole time. But I think if you really love something and devote a lot of yourself to it there is tremendous beauty and reality in that, and just because you move on from it and do something else doesn’t mean it was a waste. To say “Oh I picked the wrong thing” undercuts what it meant to you.

interview

It is not a betrayal of yourself, Hodges counsels, if you decide you need to be someone different. She cites a Korean phrase, “yeolsimhi il hagehsseumnidah,” that involves a deep bow and the internal resolution: “I will work hard; I will do my best.” That applies, she hints, when you reorient yourself to new pursuits. You are allowed to start something different or to realize that you were the different one all along.

Where’s the bibliography?

In this memoir, Hodges demonstrates three valuable skills for navigating change: 

1. She permits herself the freedom to acknowledge that yes, her life has so far been devoted to the pursuit of becoming a professional violinist. Where some might quail, however, and be tempted to beat themselves up for not progressing far enough, fast enough, Hodges examines what has made her moments with her violin and the minds of so many composers so meaningful, lets herself grieve the transition, and concludes that the practice itself was worth it. She alters her narrative: the story isn’t “girl wastes years trying to be a professional,” but “girl masters many elements of playing the violin and derives rich meaning from her discipline.”
2. She does not give in to the sunk cost fallacy*, which drives people to keep doing something, even if it isn’t really working out, simply because they have already expended so much time and effort on that endeavor. She lets herself walk away. That’s a valuable freedom to give yourself if you feel hitched to something that doesn’t seem to be flourishing. It’s OK. You can change your aims. 
3. Hodges hangs on to what was joyous and rewarding about playing the violin. Rather than casting it away or rejecting the practice altogether, she negotiates a fresh approach. She doesn’t guilt herself; she doesn’t push herself to “keep trying.” She tries differently. She lets herself embrace a looser, more improvisational style better suited to how she understands rhythm. She acknowledges what kind of player she actually is and grows toward that rather than becoming crushed by her failure to force herself to be the player she thought she should be. You can still love what you love, in other words, while changing your relationship to it.

“The real conclusion I’ve come to is that, fundamentally, I don’t want to play [violin] in the same way anymore,” Hodges said. “I don’t want to be the person I used to be.”

A little more

• Natalie Hodges mentions the work of Anniruddh Patel, who has consolidated his research on human entrainment into a theory of beat perception called ASAP: Action Stimulation for Auditory Prediction
• Natalie and her sister Eloise perform Bach
• Listen to an interview with Natalie Hodges on the podcast Back from Broken

Navigate drastic changes with What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us by Mike Mariani

Another narrative that braids memoir and science, Mariani’s book digs into the complexities of needing to reinvent yourself during absolute duress. Forced into personal reinvention by chronic illness and collapse, Mariani becomes fascinated by others who have undergone profound, unsought change. 

To that end, he profiles six cases of what he calls “afterlives,” lives rebuilt post-catharsis that are unrecognizable even to their owners. A girl emerges from a traumatic brain injury with a drastically altered personality. A man wakes from a coma to contemplate a double amputation. Life sometimes steps in to deal a drastic blow, and things are never the same. 

What perplexes Mariani is how the people he profiles are able to regather themselves and grow. Researchers might label this post-traumatic growth, which, without undermining the severity of physical and psychological trauma, illustrates the coals of resiliency burning quietly within so many of us.

Of course, trauma contains very little that is redemptive for some sufferers, who are subsequently crushed. Others, like those Mariani seeks out, find ways to tell themselves new narratives about what has happened and about what is still possible for them. They do not see themselves as empty hulks or relics of who they used to be, but determine to reshape themselves, committing to finding out who they will become. 

What they experience in drastic ways, we can apply in quieter ways within our own lives. Mariani’s examples also show us how we each contain so many potential possibilities, so many identities and ways of being. We can focus on our main goals, for example, but are well-cautioned not to become blind to other possibilities. Should apparent disaster strike, Mariani wants us to know, these other possibilities may begin to sprout. A disaster forces self-examination, he points out; a cataclysmic change forces us onto weedy, uncomfortable roads we had no intention of exploring. What then? 

While I applaud Mariani’s approach, I’m also open to discomfort over part of this book’s message, a discomfort I would like to probe in greater depth. Namely, the notion that trauma conveys deeper shades of meaning and more capacity to feel. Yes. And. Pushed to its extreme, this idea starts to hint that those of us left relatively unscarred by disaster are lesser souls, unexercised, perhaps, not driven to our limits or not in possession of narratives that are as interesting.

“The Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran wrote, “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” The catastrophes that carve themselves deep inside of us also leave us with increased depth, augmenting the volume of feeling we’re able to hold. And how can we measure devotion but by how much the vessels that we become for our art, faith, saviors, and crusades have the capacity to contain?”

This feeds the fallacy–I believe it to be a fallacy, at least–that some kind of tragic flaw or set of oppressive circumstances is necessary in an artist’s or full-feeling soul’s life. We are well-conditioned, it’s true, to admire narratives that demonstrate how to overcome adversity; we clap for the familiar ground of injustice and pain overcome with grit. Gibran’s sentiment appeals, but is it true? Always? What about those absolutely gutted by disaster?

What about those whose lives have less granular or easily elucidated grittiness; what about those whose challenges cannot be summed up in dramatic ways? People can become tempted, I think, to rely on what has been traumatic to lend their lives relevance, but I do not think this is necessarily so. Is it possible to admire steady lives left mostly unscarred, which freed people to be more stable and possibly more creative? Is it possible to find someone compelling who has not been pushed within an inch of breaking? This may be a pet peeve of mine, an over-sensitivity to the reification or centralization of trauma, when trauma is best understood within a more holistic setting of personality, environment, and culture, including the brighter moments, too. 

We need not be victims, I think I’m trying to say, to have lived lives worthy of interest. Fortunately, Mariani does not push this idea too staunchly. His point is well-taken: that a life’s course can alter in a single fingersnap, and that other, still-satisfying lives are possible. You need not return to who you were; you indeed cannot. But I would like space, too, for those whose trauma was predominantly negative and who did not scavenge up silver linings, just as I also wish for more narratives about the benefits of being less physically, emotionally, and psychologically riven.

“Examining our behaviors and thought patterns demands sustained, uninterrupted self-work, and the fullness of our everyday lives and the finite attention spans that rove through them sometimes appear engineered to thwart personal investigations. For many, such an undertaking is undesirable in any case: Those of us content with our lives are not compelled to confront or interrogate our habits, lifestyles, or underlying beliefs. Contentment doesn’t incentivize change–it does everything in its power to forestall it. But those of us learning to survive in the ill-disposed, unaccommodating terrain of afterlives–marooned on the desert islands we have little affinity for–must open ourselves up to it.”

Where’s the bibliography?

What Mariani’s profiles bring to life is the reassurance of adaptability. We can all adapt. We forget this. We do not believe that, if we were to lose a leg or a profession, we will ever settle back into the familiar centrality of how we felt before. Yet, very often, we do. We find our core tenets. We return to familiar perspectives and emotions. For those stricken by circumstances, this can soothe. You will find your base level. Whatever just occurred will likely not wreck you, not completely.

You are also able to shift what happened to you. Not the raw acts, but your own interpretation of events. The event’s personal meaning, in other words. It can take effort and time, even years. Yet survivors of extreme circumstances show us that it is possible to reduce the density and weight of past experiences, possible to learn how to reduce the bitterness and possible to integrate the events into your overall being rather than let them continue to be the Great Truth of who you are.

A little more

• Mike Mariani’s website
• Read more about post-traumatic growth in this Scientific American article
• Mike Mariani gives an interview on Shaping Opinion

Watch generations reinvent themselves with A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

1970s India; 600+ pages; a sharp stomach-cramp of a read. I’m not sure I’m being kind with this recommendation, a long and lugubrious story of four disparate characters that, as some reviewers describe it, pours the bituminous heaviness of Solzhenitsyn into Dickens’s crowded alleyways. 

But are to ignore the narratives about the kinds of lives that are actually lived, yet so often ignored? The lives, I mean, of “small” characters who do not lead, who may not understand why they are pincered between national policy and crushing poverty, and who may not ask why because such knowledge simply wouldn’t change much. 

“Let me tell you a secret: there is no such thing as an uninteresting life

One day you must tell me your full and complete story, unabridged and unexpurgated.We will set aside some time for it, and meet. It’s very important.

Maneck smiled. ‘Why is it important?’

It’s extremely important because it helps to remind yourself of who you are. Then you can go forward, without fear of losing yourself in this ever-changing world.”

Under these circumstances, reinvention is a strong word. Resurvival or re-endurance might be more apt. Re-something else, in any case, something that acknowledges the way that small triumphs are sometimes one’s only allotment against much larger and more adamantine circumstances. I think it’s worth asking these questions because, as Hodges pointed out earlier, the concept of reinvention rests on the assumption of sufficient room for choice and for somewhat independent movement. This is not vouchsafed to all, and so acts of reinvention can become smaller and increasingly more interior for those whose lives are not expansive enough to strike off in new directions. The striking off and expansion happen inside, where others may not as readily observe the changes.

Some readers find Mistry’s book too depressing, too given over to hopelessness. I would not agree. Life itself feels no compulsion to shellac existence with a pleasant taste, and so I do not believe literature should be bound by that compulsion either. Besides, Mistry’s writing is not ceaselessly dour–there are grace notes, after all; there are flights of thought that hint at how to express yourself during adversity and how to be more than an embodied score-card of losses and disappointments. 

What is actually heartless, I hold, is to turn away from these sorts of lives and narratives as if they don’t exist at all. You may not personally be able to personally reach those being crushed by circumstance, but you are still far from powerless. There are so many small acts that are themselves grace notes against despair, tiny gestures that reinvent the world. Could you volunteer? Donate? Make, in some way, reinvention for others more possible? I think you can.

Where’s the bibliography?

I’m the kind of person who finds relief in acknowledging the kind of things that actually happen, unsavory as they may be. They, too, shape us and form our overall world. So here it’s instructive to draw parallels between Mintry’s observations and present conditions. It’s helpful to see how people are not mere cogs, but are interiorly lush with observations and reflections. You do not know, this book avers, what is happening behind your father’s face or behind your neighbor’s wall, much less how things transpire seas away. And what if that leaves room for wonder and realization?

A little more

• January magazine interviews Rohinton Mistry
• Discover more about “The Emergency,” the historical setting of Mistry’s book
• Listen to what inspired Rohinton Mistry to write A Fine Balance