steppy

Sometimes you shouldn't follow your impulses.

I chose to do a drawing of myself jumping happily from a cliff. I had myself wearing a sweater and the other clothing items because they're what I feel most comfortable and free in. My face shows happiness because I usually don't care about the consequences of my actions before or doing them. I usually do what I want, within reason, without considering how those actions could have results I wasn't expecting either on myself or my surroundings. The cliff was supposed to represent my good decisions and how I was on solid ground. Me leaping off of that was supposed to show how I'm making different decisions than I'm used to and I don't really know where those choices will bring me. 

 Most of the general population believes that once your personality is set in place, it's set in stone and is unchangeable. Your personality becomes so ingrained into yourself that it becomes as much a part of you as your heart, your lungs, or your hand. Someone who had been in a gang previously will always want to be part of that kind of lifestyle, whether it be substance abuse or crimes against society. In the podcast “The Personality Myth”, the narrator meets one of the inmates and immediately enjoys his company and conversation and thinks of him as a kind, intelligent person. When she learns the reason he was sentenced to prison, though, she thinks that there is something wrong with him and there will always be something inherently evil about him, even if he has changed drastically since when he first committed the crime. 

William James, one of the original thinkers and psychologists, first started the idea that personality was set in stone at birth. He believed in the idea of pragmatism, which is the thought that our decisions and actions are preemptively decided due to our beliefs and previous actions. James along with C.S. Pierce, popularized the idea of pragmatism throughout our society today, possibly making the population less open-minded about the idea of somebody’s personality  changing overtime. 

I believe that your personality can change if you continue to keep up the amount of effort that keeps it changed. Once the finite details of your personality have revealed themselves and settled into place, it’s extremely difficult to rip those little details out and replace them with something new. It’s even more difficult, I think, to make people believe that you’ve actually changed that. As an example, my boyfriend made me a promise that this year he’d do all of his homework and physically try to be passing all of his classes the entire year. Only a few months into the semester, however, he’d already subconsciously reverted back to how he was last year; not doing his work, not paying attention in class, and not actually trying to succeed in them. After I chewed him out for it, I was able to get him to do all of his missing work and, hopefully, start paying attention and taking notes whenever he should be. You can only really change your personality if you force yourself into changing it up to a period where it just comes naturally, although you can sometimes switch subconsciously into doing things you would previously do without realizing.