The One Superpower Everyone Has

Sometimes I suspect we invented superheroes because we, as humans, felt powerless in our humanity.

If you cut us, we’d bleed. A tiny, infected wound could lead to losing a body part or death. We had no control over time, disease, death, or sea. We couldn’t even control our thoughts.

Everyone reaches this realization at some point in their lives, or maybe we all know it, but it just dawns on us how much we have no control over it during different life events.

I knew pretty early how fragile my humanity was. My first realization happened when I had my first set of bullies. They were bigger than me, stronger, and older. When my mum found out, she made plans to change my school.

At first, changing schools made me feel like a failure because I felt like I was backing down instead of fighting to defend myself as they do in the cartoons I liked (they really should stop kids like me from watching tv).

Time passed in my new school, and I realized no one knew me. I could be anyone there and wouldn’t have to be bullied. Unfortunately, life doesn’t quite play out as it does in the cartoons I watched (I still got bullied… a lot).

Still, I wouldn’t know it then, but that would be the first time I used my superpower.

The first time I ever tried to reinvent myself.

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Before I go on, I should clarify: I’m not trying to make you change yourself. I’m not trying to show you how to either — there are a lot of self-help books out there that can do that for you.

I’m showing you it’s possible and telling you why it’s possible.

The Psychology Behind Reinvention

People don’t change

At least, that’s what many people think. When you have cases of serial killers who showed signs of sociopathic tendencies from childhood, it’s easy to believe there’s no hope for change.

Some developmental psychologists (I’m looking at you, Freud) tell us that your personality is formed and set in stone during childhood. We’re told there’s an age after which no change can happen.

But that’s not what we see in our everyday lives. We see people’s personalities change as they grow older. We see people spend years with a certain mindset, only for them to come around and change it.

Look at this tweet below, for instance:

You can see that no matter the age, people can reinvent themselves. One reason for this is that personality is not constant.

Yes, contrary to popular opinion, one’s personality is not static. Our personalities are not immovable forces that solely determine every aspect of our existence.

Here’s how the APA Dictionary of Psychology defines personality:

Personality refers to the enduring characteristics and behavior that comprise a person’s unique adjustment to life, including major traits, interests, drives, values, self-concept, abilities, and emotional patterns

I want to emphasize enduring — which means that even though personality can be long-lasting; it is not permanent.

One’s personality comprises various traits, habits, beliefs, etc. Think of it like multiple blocks of different sizes and colors.

To change the shape or size of this building, one must carefully replace those bricks with the desired bricks. Using this illustration, it’s clear that changing one’s personality is no easy task.

But that doesn’t make it an impossible one.

Recent studies show that one way to change your personality is by changing your personality traits. Moving from introversion towards extroversion, for example.

While changing broader traits may be more complex than changing others, it is not impossible. However, there hasn’t been enough evidence to show if it’s possible to alter broad traits completely — for example, changing from being an extrovert to completely being an introvert.

Moving from one end of a personality spectrum to the next would be difficult. Researchers note that adopting new habits — no matter how small — and self-beliefs makes personality change easier.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to spend years battling to change personality traits. Depending on the interventions used, it can take

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The Biology Behind Reinvention

Growth, like many things, is beyond our control. It’s out of our hands and in the hands of a higher power — time.

Every human learns this at some point — there is a time for everything, especially growth. For cis females, there will be a time we develop breasts and hips. For cis males, there will come a time your voices grow deeper.

The human body experiences different growth spurts, and certain parts stop growing once you reach a certain age; the brain is not exempted.

However, just because our brains stop developing doesn’t mean we stop learning. Studies show that our brains are still active even till our later years.

Despite the brain fully developing, certain external factors — like trauma and drugs — can alter our brain’s structure by causing severe damage. To fix itself, the brain rewires its neurons.

This was greatly propounded in the 1960s when scientists discovered the human brain could heal itself from an injury by rewiring itself. Before then, the entire medical profession thought any damage done to the brain was permanent.

Imagine the human body is an app. For this app to perform all its functions, it needs precise backend coding (neurons). An error in the codes (trauma, drugs, etc.) would make the app have bugs.

The only way we can fix these bugs is to rewrite the code.

By rewiring our synapses, certain habits and traits are changed, and new ones are reintroduced, which is why certain conditions like addiction are possible. It’s also how learning is possible.

When you learn something new, you create a new synapse. Through constant exposure to that knowledge, the synapse grows stronger.

So we know that a new synapse is formed each time we develop a new habit. Every day, through tiny patterns, we create new synapses and strengthen the old ones.

All this means that people can reinvent themselves as often as they want in their lifetime, especially if that involves learning something new. We easily fall into the trap of believing that age is a death sentence to our dreams.

We tell ourselves stuff like: “I’m too old to get back to college,” “It’s too late to learn a new language,” or “I may never heal from this.”

We limit how much we can improve or heal ourselves when our most excellent tool for reinvention (our brains) is vastly unlimited.

Science itself tells us it is possible to heal from severe trauma. It is possible to live a new life, not like the past but not with trauma-induced actions.

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Nothing reminds me more of our power to reinvent ourselves than seeing it represented on TV. Caitlin Moran’s 2020 movie How to Build a Girl tells the coming-of-age story of Johana Morrigan, a Wolverhampton girl who aspires to be a music journalist.

Johanna constantly reinvents herself to fit her to make money for herself and her family, and when she sees the damage her new self caused, she reinvents herself again.

What I love most about it is the confidence with which she does it. Accepting that parts of her needed to be worked on and realizing that she could change them. That she was not obliged to let her mistakes define her because life is an endless journey of reinventions.

What do you do when you build yourself, only to realize you built yourself with the wrong things? You rip it up and start again.

– Johanna Morrigan, How to Build a Girl

It felt nice to hear Johanna say these words in the movie’s final scene because I grew up in an environment that told me one could never undo the damage from making a huge mistake.

I saw people in their 20s and 30s give up on themselves and their dreams because they made mistakes.

Choosing the wrong course, dropping out of school, getting pregnant, or being too close to the wrong side of the family, were what could ruin your life forever. Getting diagnosed with a mental disorder was a death sentence.

I wonder what would happen if more saw life the way Johanna did — an endless journey of self-improvement.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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