It's Okay to Change Your Mind

A bit of rambling because I am OVERWHELMED.

It's okay to change your mind.

Whether your opinion has changed because time passed, you've had new experiences, or learned more information, it's okay to change your mind.

This concept is something I struggled with when I was younger. When you identify with something for long enough, it's hard to shake it, even if you want to. Because of the comfort of the habit, or because it's how other people see you, or because you feel like a hypocrite, but the truth is, it's fine. A yes can turn to a no, a childhood favorite book can become less appealing, a beloved celebrity can let you down, and it's okay to change your mind.

I ran into this problem when I was first coming out. After practicing comphet to the best of my ability my first year in college, it was becoming increasingly clear to me what I'd known deep down since I was 12: I was gay as hell. But I was afraid to label myself and be "wrong." No one was around to tell me that sexuality is a spectrum and is fluid and the labels are only necessary if you want them for ease of communication, that there is no label police that's going to come take away your card if you realize later you were wrong about the label you chose when you were 19. But I wish someone had. I wish someone had said, it's okay to change your label when it feels right to. Just because you said yes to a kiss earlier in the night doesn't mean you can't say no later in the night. You can quit caffeine if you want to, even though people identified you with all things coffee and caffeinated since you were 14. It's okay to change your mind. It’s okay to change.

I recently found an old blog entry from when I was in my early 20s where I went on a whole tirade about how stupid I thought the concept of "boy toys" and "girl toys" at McDonald's. This was before I had any queer friends or any understanding of gender as a social construct or even what being outside the binary was, but as someone who grew up loving the Power Rangers and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles but always relegated to the "girl toys" whether or not I liked them (and sometimes I did!), and having that day seen a little girl exchange her iCarly toy for a Power Rangers toy much to the confusion of the employee, I had decided this was a silly concept. It's funny, it reads very much like a Gender Studies 101 homework assignment, like dancing on the surface of the point without ever going particularly deep. In that post, I even try to couch that opinion, apologizing for sounding "preachy" and "assuring" my imaginary audience (my diary and blog entries were always to an imaginary reader and never myself) that I wasn't a "die-hard feminist." God forbid!

"I’m all for equal rights, don’t get me wrong,” my younger self wrote, “but I actively avoid getting too involved in politics, generally. It stresses me out and has too much negativity for me to let it into my day-to-day thinking. I’m not ignorant – I’ll read news stories if enough people mention it, I donate to HRC and get their newsletter email every day (and sometimes I even read it) – but I’m not really one to climb atop a soapbox and go on about things like whether or not a popular television show is masochistic [sic]* or not."

(*I definitely meant misogynistic but was a baby idiot.)

Now, this was coming from a privileged child who had only voted in one presidential election, for Obama, and he was president. I was slowly coming out, but wasn't part of any queer communities and basically didn't know anything about the world at all. I had been thrust from a small, Catholic circle into the wide world of a huge college adn then plopped right into the workforce in New York City. I didn't understand how much a president could affect, and how much of politics goes beyond who is president. It wouldn't be long before I WOULD call myself a die-hard feminist, and then later be even wary of when and where I used that label, because of transphobic and racist people who don't understand intersectionality. I didn't understand that true change can only happen if we're willing to be stressed out and uncomfortable, and that someday whether, I liked it or not, I would be thinking about politics as part of my day-to-day thinking. I was doing some of the work in little ways without realizing it; the world had just villainized the word "feminist" so much that it scared me. But I had once felt the same way about the word "lesbian" too. It's embarrassing to go back and read the way I was trying to couch my feelings in what I thought would be "palatable" and accepted, to try to avoid making anyone angry or view me as too outspoken or difficult. It was people pleasing to a fault, and I'm glad I grew out of it to the point where I became a menace to my last office job and would openly joke about being the "angry lesbian" there to ruin their fun when they tried to put "his and hers" on packaging, for example. And back when the phrase was at peak popularity, I was called a “social justice warrior” online almost daily, and I wore that with pride.

My younger self would be highly amused (and possibly horrified) to know now my entire THING is kind of getting on soap boxes, especially and specifically about whether or not a popular TV show is misogynistic or not.

But my point is: it's okay to change your mind. You don't even have to make a big announcement about it, you can just...change. You can learn and grow. You can stop supporting the transphobic author with your money despite how deeply you identified with her work previously, you can stop buying anything you see with a penguin on it even though it's the animal you were most associated with as a child, you can embrace how much you suddenly started to like purple after years of denouncing anything even remotely "girly" in your stunted opinion.

And it's okay to see that the political party you've been supporting despite all the red flags is also absolutely idiotic after a group text is exposed on which they added a random journalist, and decide to stop supporting them. It's okay to take down the signs in your yard and change your voter registration. You don't even have to say you were wrong, you can claim it's them that changed and not you, you don't have to give a reason at all, you can just change your mind.

I know that last bit isn't going to reach who it needs to, not here on this platform, but the blind hero-worship and celebrity status some people give politicians is an increasingly dangerous problem, and it's getting harder and harder to watch. Especially when it seems so deeply linked to their identities in a way that will become harder for them to let go of, no matter what happens. Because they're afraid to admit they changed their mind. Afraid it means they'll have to admit they were wrong. This isn’t exclusively a problem on one side, but some folks in particular have run right into cult territory and it’s a problem. This is also obviously an over-simplification and a very small sliver of all the things going wrong but I am slowly losing my mind and processing it piecemeal like this is all I’ve got right now.

But this advice also applies to other situations, and it's a lesson I keep having to learn and remind myself. That a yes can change to a no, a no can change to a yes. Your #1 choice can become #92. "I don't need help" can change to "I do need help," even if the situation hasn’t actually changed. Your goals and dreams and plans can shift and change. YOU can change, if you want to, if you need to. And it's okay to change your mind.