“You are a different character in the mind of each person who knows you, because their impression of you is made of the bare bones of what they’ve seen, fleshed out by their knowledge of themselves.” - Gurwinder Bhogal
The Lonely Chapter has another perspective to it - as you grow, you don’t fit in with your friends, but this means that your friends don’t fit in with you either, and this causes a reaction from their side too.
The hardest part of changing yourself isn’t just improving your habits, it’s escaping the people who keep handing you your old costume.
Others don’t just remember who you were, they enforce it - which is why reinvention so often feels like trying to break out of a prison you can’t see.
Psychologists call this dynamic an Object Relation.
When people interact with you, they’re not engaging with you in your full, living complexity.
They’re dealing with the version of you that exists in their head, a simplified character built from fragments of memory and coloured by their own projections.
In Object Relations Theory, an “object” isn’t a thing, it’s the internalised image of another person.
We don’t just carry people as they are; we carry a mental sketch.
Which is why if you make a radical change, you’ll usually meet resistance.
Your transformation destabilises the representation that the people around you are attached to, so they try to nudge you back into the familiar role they know.
Charles Horton Cooley called this the Looking-Glass Self: we come to know ourselves by seeing our reflection in other people’s eyes.
If those mirrors keep reflecting the old you, it’s hard to step into the new one.
In social psychology, Self-Verification Theory shows that people prefer interactions that confirm what they already believe about themselves and about you.
And if you disrupt this script, you introduce friction.
In one study, participants with poor self-image chose to interact with people who criticised them rather than praised them.
Meaning that even people with low self-esteem often prefer others to treat them in ways that confirm their pessimistic self-view because negative consistency feels safer than optimistic unfamiliarity.
If that’s true for how we see ourselves, imagine how much other people cling to their picture of you.
Before his conversion, St. Augustine was notorious for chasing pleasure, indulgence, and distraction. After his dramatic turn to faith, he struggled to convince old friends that he was no longer the same man. They resisted not just out of scepticism, but because the new Augustine didn’t fit the story they had of him.
In Fitzgerald’s novel, Jay Gatsby began life as James Gatz, a poor farm boy desperate to escape his origins. He tries to reinvent himself as a dazzling millionaire. But no matter how hard he works at it, the people around him reduce him back to the “upstart” outsider. His reinvention collapsed under the weight of their collective refusal to update their version of him.
Nelson Mandela started as a fiery revolutionary, advocating armed resistance against apartheid. When he walked out of prison after 27 years, his followers expected him to emerge hardened and vengeful. Instead, he embodied reconciliation. But that reinvention only truly stuck once he stepped onto the world stage, far beyond the circles that had known the old Mandela.
David Bowie began as a struggling musician in London, trying to make a name for himself in a conventional scene. His breakthrough was constant self-reinvention: Ziggy Stardust, the Thin White Duke, and more. But each transformation often required leaving behind one circle, one city, one audience, because the people who knew him too well couldn’t help but cling to the previous Bowie.
And in ordinary life, the script repeats.
The friend who quits drinking was once the reliable partner-in-crime, but their newfound sobriety unsettles the group and throws everyone else’s bad habits into harsh contrast.
The shy colleague who becomes confident was once predictable in their quietness, so their assertiveness now reads as arrogance.
The young adult who comes home at Christmas was once an awkward teenager; however, no matter how much they’ve grown, their family insists on infantilising them.
TLDR: many people don’t like you making positive changes because it’s effortful to keep up with and threatening to their shortcomings, so they dissuade you from doing it. Which is why meaningful change so often requires escaping your environment. Change isn’t just about building a new self; it’s about escaping the gravitational pull of the selves that still exist in other people’s minds.
Also see "I am who I think you think I am".
