In You’ve Changed, the journalist unpacks the persistent human desire to reinvent oneself with religion, therapy, drugs, and more.
Are we more obsessed with changing ourselves nowadays than in the past?
I think so. Transformation can now be performed, narrated, and optimized on social media. The past decade has seen old stories break down, Trump, polarization, technological disruption, the disillusionment of young people. I write about the “Be the Change” movement, which I find really interesting—but when I talked to students about the idea, there was a mini-revolt because so many felt powerless to “be the change.” When we feel unable to change the world, we focus on changing ourselves—how we identify, how we’re seen.
One striking narrative in your book is the story of Michael Glatze, a journalist and friend of yours who was an outspoken, gay atheist and became an anti-gay, fundamentalist Christian. What do you make of it?
Like many changes, it’s a mystery. We often oversimplify by saying he’s lost his mind, or he’s in it for a grift. Has Michael really changed? Yes and no. His identity certainly shifted. But the core personality, which saw everything in black-and-white, and was absolutely certain about everything, is still there. So, there’s a question of what shifts and what stays the same when we undergo seemingly radical change.
You write about California prison inmates trying to convince skeptical parole boards their core personalities have changed. How did they go about that?
They needed to articulate the arc of their transformation. There are unwritten rules. You have to admit how destructive and terrible you were. You can’t blame your childhood trauma, but you have to talk about how it impacted your crime. Then you need to talk about everything you did to transform yourself. It can be problematic to claim that God changed you; simplistic spiritual explanations are not enough for a parole board. But many prisons have support classes with a new agey sensibility, so it’s all about how many classes you took and what you learned. It is remarkable the transformations that happen when you’re working on yourself for 20 years behind bars. In many cases the transformation is real. But when we’re convincing others that we’ve changed, there’s always a performance, and the world sits in judgment. We are all on the parole board.
You discuss your own tour of change methodologies—therapy, hallucinogens, and workshops at California’s Esalen Institute. Did they work?
Oh yeah. I learned a tremendous amount about myself in the workshops. Even therapy that I’m critical of, that was focused on inner child work and blaming one’s parents, gave me useful ideas: if I have a big reaction, it’s possible I’ve been triggered by something in my past. But people who reduce change to one formula are lying. Change is complicated and enigmatic and beautiful and confusing. And it’s paradoxical: once we stop trying to change so much, we actually change.
