You learn that your personality has a certain shape, with definite, inflexible bounds—bounds you find out about because you keep bonking into them headfirst when you try to change. (An acquaintance who used to grate on me won me over when I overheard her sigh, “D’ya ever wish you could just . . . trade in your whole personality for a new one?”) We are not infinitely malleable. Like it or not, you are a certain kind of person. Life is, in this respect, like that game in which you’re assigned an identity scrawled on a piece of paper that everyone else can see but you can’t, and you have to try
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