The Lonely Chapter
“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".
The Anorexic Hermit Crab
There’s a kind of hermit crab that dies if it doesn’t find a bigger shell. Its soft, vulnerable body grows slowly over time, until the shell that once protected it becomes a claustrophobic prison.
When this happens, the crab must leave the comfort of its current shell, venture out into the dangerous open, and risk being exposed, naked, unarmored, and killable while it searches for something bigger, something better.
The crab has no choice, as if it delays too long, it will be crushed by its own growth. The body will swell; the shell won’t. The thing that once kept it safe will start to deform it.
The hiding place becomes a tomb.
But humans have one advantage over crabs - we can choose to stop growing We can choose to keep ourselves small enough to fit inside our old patterns, stay in the wrong shell, pretend we haven’t changed, and fold ourselves into the old shape just one more time. We can choose comfort over truth, even if it slowly ruins us.
It’s easy to mock someone who clings to outdated beliefs or toxic habits, but most of us don’t resist growth because we’re lazy or deluded. We resist because we’re afraid.
Because unlike the crab, who simply gets bigger, growth for humans is often voluntary, and worse, it requires the death of our old selves. Every real transformation involves a period of vulnerability. When your old shell no longer fits, but you haven’t yet found a new one - that’s The Shedding Chapter.
That’s where the danger lives. The moment when the old response doesn’t serve you anymore, but the new one hasn’t yet solidified.
You no longer want to shut down during conflict, but your voice still trembles when you speak. You want to stop people-pleasing, but guilt claws at you when you set a boundary. You want to act like the confident version of yourself, but you’re still haunted by the fear that it’s all pretend.
This in-between space is terrifying because you have no proof that this new shell will hold. Which is why so many people never leave their old one.
They don’t stop growing because they’re flawed, they stop growing because growth makes them vulnerable, and vulnerability means pain.
So they become anorexic hermit crabs. Shrinking themselves, starving their needs, suppressing their instincts. They become too scared to want more, because wanting demands becoming. They wear the same identity for a decade. Still the funny one. Still the reliable one. Still the lone wolf. Still the hard worker.
Not because it’s true, but because it fits. Because no one questions it. Because stepping out of that shell would mean enduring the awful moment where their new self gets laughed at, or worse, ignored. And yet, what they’re afraid of isn’t failure, it’s exposure. They fear being seen trying.
To try is to admit there’s something you want, and to want is to admit you don’t have it yet, and if you don’t have it yet then maybe you’re not enough.
So instead, they stay in the old shell. Old beliefs. Old identity. Old coping mechanisms. Better to be secure in a suffocating version of yourself than to be uncertain in a more expansive one.
But there’s a cost. You can lie to your desires, but they don’t stop whispering, they just go quiet and bitter. You’ll start to envy people who take risks, not because they always win, but because they had the guts to show up unarmored. You’ll criticise others for being naive, impulsive, arrogant, but really you’re just allergic to your own dormant potential.
And eventually, like the crab, if you don’t grow, you don’t survive. Not physically but spiritually, emotionally and creatively. You become safe and dead. Alive, but not really living.