This Is Not Who I Was
On contradiction, revision, and the shame we attach to growth.
To talk about change — real change, the kind that implicates the body as much as the mind — you have to give up the seduction of coherence. Coherence is a story we tell to make ourselves legible, to convince others (and often ourselves) that there has always been a single, continuous thread. It’s comforting, that illusion of continuity. It reads well. But it isn’t honest. Especially not for those of us whose lives have required a kind of constant revision — of self, of desire, of belief — to survive.
Experience doesn’t move in straight lines. It loops, it contradicts, it refuses to resolve. Queer experience exposes how flimsy the demand for consistency really is. What looks like contradiction from the outside can feel, from within, like fidelity to complexity, to truth as it actually unfolds. There is a kind of integrity in allowing the self to remain unsettled.
To queer something is not only to expand it, not only to make room within it. It is to interrogate the structure that required exclusion in the first place. It asks: why do we want things to hold still? Why do we distrust ambiguity? Why do we conflate certainty with righteousness? These are not abstract questions. They shape how we move through the world, how we attach to our identities, how we relate to one another when our narratives begin to diverge.
People change because they are permeable. We take things in like ideas, language, other people’s pain and pleasure, and we are changed by them. Sometimes subtly, sometimes irrevocably. No one arrives fully formed, and no one stays the same. But we live in a moment that treats change with suspicion, as though evolution were evidence of some prior failure. As though admitting uncertainty were a kind of moral weakness.
I’ve felt the impulse to fix myself in place, to defend a former version of my thinking because it once felt necessary, or righteous, or true. But the self that refuses to change becomes brittle. And brittleness is not the same as strength.
Movements are not immune to this. Even those committed to liberation can begin to harden around their own definitions of correctness. What starts as a set of values becomes a set of rules; what begins as a critique of power can replicate its rigidity. There is a subtle shift from alignment to performance, from shared commitment to enforced sameness. And in that shift, something constricts.
It’s a familiar paradox: communities that resist domination can struggle to hold together their own differences. Not because the differences are irreconcilable, but because they are treated as threats rather than as the material of collective life. Fragmentation follows — not always loudly, but persistently. A splintering into smaller and smaller certainties.
But I don’t think the answer is to smooth those differences over, to pretend they don’t matter. I think the question is whether we can learn to stay with them differently. To understand divergence not as a failure, but as a condition of being in relation.
Here, Melisa Lozada Oliva offers a useful, embodied example. Her work, spanning poetry and fiction, does not remain static. In her early poetry, there is a sharpness, a compression, a kind of incantatory insistence on naming: desire, body, diaspora, the inherited and the chosen self. Later, in her fiction, that voice expands. It becomes more narrative, more diffuse, more willing to linger in contradiction and ambiguity. The shift is not a betrayal of her earlier work; it is an evolution of form and attention. She does not abandon her concerns; she refracts them differently. To read her across time is to witness a mind in motion.
The speaker who once demanded to be understood in a particular register begins to explore what happens when understanding itself becomes unstable. Identity is no longer simply asserted; it is questioned, performed, undone, remade. This is not inconsistency. It is growth. It is a refusal to be pinned down by the expectations of a single genre, a single audience, or a single moment in time. What would it mean to extend that generosity to artists, to thinkers, to each other and into our political lives?
Not everyone will speak in the same register. Some voices will be sharp, declarative, urgent. Others will be searching, provisional, unsure. Some will prioritize theory; others will speak from experience that resists easy abstraction. None of these modes are sufficient alone. But together, they begin to approximate something closer to truth.
This requires a different relationship to disagreement. Right now, disagreement often feels like a rupture, a signal that something has gone wrong. And sometimes it has. Harm is real, and it needs to be named. But not every difference is harm. Sometimes it’s simply evidence of where we are — what we’ve lived, what we’ve learned, what we haven’t yet understood.
If we treat every divergence as disqualifying, we foreclose the possibility of transformation. We create conditions where people are rewarded for certainty, for fluency in the “correct” language, rather than for curiosity or growth. We make it harder to admit, I don’t know. Harder to say, I’ve changed.
And yet, without that vulnerability, nothing actually shifts.
There is risk in openness, of course. Without boundaries, accountability can dissolve. But there is also risk in the opposite extreme — in the speed with which we exile, the ease with which we reduce a person to a single position, a single moment. That kind of rigidity doesn’t protect us as much as we think it does. It isolates us. It narrows the field of possible connection.
Meanwhile, the systems we’re trying to dismantle don’t require purity. They require coordination. They persist not because they are ideologically flawless, but because they are organized, because they tolerate internal contradiction when it serves their continuity.
I keep returning to the idea of conversation — not as something polite or superficial, but as something charged, generative. In a story, tension between characters is what creates movement. It reveals what matters. It forces change. A narrative where everyone agrees is static, inert.
Why would we expect anything different from our political lives?
What if we understood our collective thinking as something more like a chorus — discordant at times, uneven, but alive? Not unified in a single voice, but engaged in the difficult work of listening, responding, revising.
This isn’t a call to abandon conviction. Convictions matter. They shape how we act, what we refuse, what we protect. But when conviction calcifies into certainty without inquiry, it stops being a guide and becomes a constraint.
On my altar, I have a photo of myself at age one and a photo of myself at age twenty-six. The person I am sitting before those images is composed of entirely distinct cells than either of the people depicted in those images, and each of them entirely distinct from the other. Yet, the face is clearly one face.
To allow for that process — to make space for it in ourselves and in each other — is not just personal. It’s collective. It asks us to build structures that can hold change without discarding the people undergoing it. To stay in relationship across difference, without collapsing that difference into sameness.
It asks us, in other words, to queer not just identity, but the way we practice politics: to let it be unstable, adaptive, responsive. To trust that multiplicity is not a weakness, but a form of intelligence.
