Sometimes the accusation is deserved. If I spent years insisting that a particular principle mattered and suddenly abandon it the moment following it becomes inconvenient for me, somebody probably should ask what happened. If I hold other people to standards I refuse to apply to myself, pointing out the inconsistency isn’t an attack on my personal growth. It’s accountability.
But we’ve stretched the idea of consistency far beyond accountability. We use it to judge people for changing their minds, leaving communities, revising beliefs, choosing different careers, adopting new language for themselves, ending relationships, discovering new needs, or admitting that something they once believed about themselves isn’t true anymore.
At some point, consistency stopped meaning that our actions should have some relationship to our stated values and started meaning that a person should remain recognizable forever.
I don’t think those are the same thing.
In fact, if we genuinely value learning, they can’t be the same thing.
Learning is supposed to change us.
That’s the entire freaking point.
If I can encounter new information, listen to people whose experiences differ from mine, discover that something I believed was inaccurate, and still emerge with every opinion exactly where I left it, I’m not sure what I’ve accomplished. I may have consumed information, but I haven’t necessarily learned anything from it.
Yet culturally, we’re strangely suspicious of people who admit they’ve changed their minds. We dig up something somebody said ten years ago and compare it with what they’re saying now as though the contradiction alone settles the question of their character. Sometimes it reveals hypocrisy. Sometimes it reveals opportunism. Sometimes the person owes an explanation or an apology for harm caused by what they previously believed.
Sometimes it reveals that ten years passed.
Context matters.
I care much more about the path between two positions than I do about the fact that the positions differ. If somebody tells me, “I used to believe this, then I learned this, I listened to these people, I examined the effect of what I believed, and I changed my mind,” I don’t consider that evidence that they’re untrustworthy.
Depending on what happened in the middle, it may be evidence that they are capable of growth.
That doesn’t erase the past. Growth is not a time machine. If our previous beliefs harmed somebody, changing those beliefs doesn’t mean the harm disappears. “I know better now” can explain why our behavior changed; it doesn’t automatically repair what happened before it did.
Accountability asks us to own that.
Rigidity asks us never to change in the first place.
Those are profoundly different expectations.
We Confuse Sincerity With Permanence
I think one reason identity change makes people uncomfortable is that we tend to treat permanence as evidence of sincerity.
If you really loved that person, how can you not love them now?
If you really believed that religion, how can you believe something different now?
If that identity was genuinely meaningful to you, how can another word fit better today?
If you truly wanted that career, why did you leave it?
If you were happy there, why aren’t you there anymore?
Underneath those questions is the assumption that something can only have been real if it remains true forever.
That would make an enormous portion of human life fake.
I have wanted things sincerely that I do not want anymore. I have believed things sincerely that I no longer believe. I have belonged in places I later outgrew. I have made choices that were right for the person I was and would be completely wrong for the person I am now.
The later truth does not automatically expose the earlier one as a lie.
Sometimes we really were that person.
Then we changed.
That’s not necessarily evidence that we lacked integrity. Integrity isn’t freezing ourselves at the moment we first make a declaration and refusing to incorporate new information because somebody might accuse us of inconsistency.
Sometimes integrity requires changing.
If I tell you that I value compassion and then discover that one of my beliefs is causing harm I hadn’t understood, which is the more consistent choice: protecting the old belief so nobody can say I’ve changed, or examining whether my actions still align with the value I claimed mattered?
If I say I value truth, I have to leave room for the deeply annoying possibility that I am wrong.
Otherwise I don’t value truth.
I value being right.
Those are also not the same thing.
Identity Can Become a Trap
Once we’ve publicly identified ourselves a certain way, changing can become considerably harder.
There are social consequences. Communities form around identity. Relationships form around it. We may have spent years defending a belief, career, practice, lifestyle, or understanding of ourselves. Other people know us through it. We may have taught it, advocated for it, built a business around it, or corrected other people about it.
Then something changes.
Now we’re not merely deciding whether a thing still fits. We’re deciding whether we’re willing to endure the embarrassment of admitting it doesn’t.
That can keep people attached to identities long after curiosity has started knocking holes in the walls.
There is a particular vulnerability in saying, “I was wrong.”
There is another in saying, “I wasn’t wrong then, but this isn’t right for me now.”
The second can be harder to explain because there isn’t necessarily a villain. Nobody betrayed you. No dramatic revelation occurred. You simply changed enough that something which once fit doesn’t anymore.
We don’t have many cultural scripts for that.
We understand conversion stories. We understand escape stories. We understand the moment somebody realizes the old thing was terrible and discovers the new thing that finally makes everything make sense.
We’re less comfortable with, “It mattered deeply to me, I don’t regret it, and I’m done.”
There’s no villain to blame and no redemption arc to applaud.
Just change.
Consistency With What?
This is where I think the word consistency needs more scrutiny.
Do I want to be consistent with every opinion I’ve ever expressed?
Absolutely not. Some of my former opinions were uninformed. Some were inherited. Some came from environments I no longer inhabit. Some were based on information that has changed. Some were simply wrong.
Do I want to be consistent with every goal I’ve ever announced?
Also no. Past Me does not get to assign Current Me homework indefinitely.
Do I want my identity to remain consistent enough that everybody who met me twenty years ago immediately recognizes the person I am today?
That seems like a deeply strange standard for a life.
What I do want is some consistency between the values I claim and the choices I make.
I want curiosity to matter enough that new information can affect me. I want compassion to matter enough that discovering I’ve caused harm changes my behavior. I want integrity to matter enough that I can admit when something no longer fits rather than continuing to perform it because I’ve already invested too much in the costume.
That kind of consistency can produce a person whose opinions, practices, boundaries, and identities change quite a lot over time.
The through-line isn’t sameness.
It’s the process by which we decide what deserves to change.
Changing Your Mind Isn’t a Get-Out-of-Accountability-Free Card
There is, of course, another side to this.
“I’ve changed” can be used manipulatively.
People can reinvent themselves without repairing harm. They can declare a new era and become angry when anybody remembers the previous one. They can adopt new language while continuing the same behavior underneath it. They can demand immediate trust because they have decided they’re different now.
Other people are not required to experience our transformation on our preferred timeline.
If I hurt someone while being the person I used to be, they are allowed to remember it. They may decide they don’t want a relationship with Current Me, regardless of how much work Current Me has done.
My growth belongs to me.
Their boundaries belong to them.
Letting an identity die doesn’t erase its consequences.
That’s why I don’t want to replace the worship of consistency with the worship of change. Change itself isn’t automatically virtuous. People can change in ways that make them crueler, less curious, less accountable, and more willing to harm others.
The question isn’t whether someone changed.
The question is how and why.
What information did they encounter?
What did they do with it?
Did their values change, or did their understanding of how to live those values change?
Can they explain the path without rewriting their own history?
Can they acknowledge harm without requiring everyone harmed by the old version to applaud the new one?
Can they tolerate being asked about the contradiction?
That last one matters to me.
If my new beliefs can’t withstand questions about how I got here, perhaps I haven’t examined them as thoroughly as I think.
Let People Become New Information
There is a strange thing we sometimes do with people we have known for a long time: we stop gathering information about them.
We already “know” them.
We know what they like. We know what they’ll say. We know what they believe. We know what they’re capable of. We know the role they play.
Then they change, and instead of updating our understanding, we treat the change as an error.
Families do this. Friend groups do it. Workplaces do it. Communities do it.
We do it to ourselves.
But people are not reference books that become unreliable when the newest edition contains revisions.
Sometimes the revision is the most accurate information available.
That doesn’t mean we discard the earlier editions. History matters. Patterns matter. If somebody announces they’ve changed after demonstrating the same harmful behavior seventeen times, skepticism is not cruelty. We are allowed to consider the whole record.
We’re also allowed to notice when the record actually changes.
I think healthy relationships require both memory and revision.
We remember enough not to pretend the past didn’t happen, and we remain curious enough not to force someone to live there forever.
We allow the possibility that the person standing in front of us knows something their former self didn’t.
Including when that person is us.
Maybe consistency isn’t about staying the same.
Maybe it’s about having principles sturdy enough to survive revision.
I don’t need to believe everything I’ve always believed in order to have integrity. I need to be willing to examine why I believe what I believe now. I need to own what I did with the beliefs I carried before. I need to be willing to change again if better information gives me a reason.
There are identities I have worn sincerely that I no longer wear.
There are things I have changed my mind about.
There will almost certainly be more.
I hope so.
Because I don’t want to spend the rest of my life defending an outdated version of myself merely so nobody can accuse me of inconsistency.
I’d rather be consistent about learning.
And learning, if we’re actually doing it, is eventually going to change the story. 💜