[AndrewDucker]

"can you ever truly not be you"

It's a question of degree. There's a clear line from me yesterday to me today, with a massive amount of similarity. I'm comfortable about my wants and needs and how my life is set up, because the "me"s of the past set things up, and I'm similar enough to them to fit into the niche they worked on.

That personality can change over time - I'm not who I was when I was 20, and I'll be different again when I'm 60. But with a slow set of changes that's easy enough to cope with - and indeed, people generally don't even notice the changes.

But if I woke up tomorrow with a vastly different personality, the change having happened all at once, it would affect all of my relationships, my working situation, my home life, etc. It's wouldn't be a slow transformation from one person to another, it would be the instant death of one personality and their replacement by a different one. And that feels very uncomfortable to people.

[yomly]

> it would be the instant death of one personality and their replacement by a different one. And that feels very uncomfortable to people.

That's a salient observation, but it's a definitely a curious aversion and possibly linked to a similar underlying thought pattern that "growth mindset" vs "fixed mindset" tries to capture:

Notions like "I can become more confident in everything I do" and "I can learn to be better with people" terrified a friend as some kind of type of desire to deceive others with some inauthentic persona that was disingenuous because you had changed your personality

[AndrewDucker]

I guess it depends on how core you view certain parts of your personality as being.

If "you" is "an introvert who isn't good with people", then "learning to be good with people" must be some kind of faking it. Rather than a change in view/approach which actually makes you like people and not be afraid of them.