The Myth of the Fixed Self

What kind of person am I?

Have you ever said about yourself, “I’m not an angry person” or maybe “I’m a worrier”, or “I’m laid back”, “I’m not a creative person”, “I’m a kind person”? We use these blanket traits as shorthand, a quick, all-encompassing label. We probably wouldn’t argue that we are these things 100% of the time. We (or others) can likely recall at least one example of when we weren’t this way. But we tend to believe that these are core traits or fixed qualities baked into who we fundamentally are.

But here’s the thing. I’m walking along the street, trying to cross the road, and a motorbike speeds past me without warning and revving loudly. My nervous system gets a shock. Adrenaline floods through me. In that moment, I’m angry. Genuinely, physically angry. My palms feel hot, my neck is tense, I want to shout. My body’s had a fright and it’s reacting exactly as it should. Does that make me “an angry person”? No. What it makes me is a person who just got startled and is having an angry response to that startle. And once I understand what happened — I wasn’t expecting it, it was sudden, my body reacted appropriately to something that felt dangerous — I can just let that anger move through me. 

I don’t need to judge myself for wanting to shout profanities in the street. A few minutes later, once my nervous system settles, the anger is gone. I’m not angry anymore. I’m not plotting revenge, thinking how I can access CCTV to find the number plate and report them to the police. I’ve moved on from this event – because it’s passed. That’s the difference between having an appropriately angry response and anger being a fixed thing.

We describe ourselves with shorthand fixed traits as a mental shortcut to explain past behaviour and predict future behaviour, offering a sense of stability and predictability in a complex world. This approach is not without merit and does work well at times. But if we believe ourselves to be a collection of fixed traits – and lacking others – this feeds into the idea of our identity being fixed. When really, I think, we’re much more like a process.

Riding the current

What does it mean to be a process rather than a fixed thing? Think about our breath. Right now, we’re breathing in and out. We don’t describe ourselves as “a breather”. We’re just engaged in the process of breathing. There’s an inhale and an exhale. Sometimes our breath is shallow because we’re stressed or concentrating. Sometimes it’s deep because we’re relaxed. The breathing itself changes depending on what’s happening, but we don’t hear people say, “Oh no, I’m not a deep breather, I’m a shallow breather.” We just notice: this is where my breathing is right now.

Same with our energy levels. When we wake up, our energy is often higher. As the day goes on and we’ve been working, moving, thinking, our energy naturally dips. By evening, we feel tired. That’s not a fixed thing about us, it’s our natural rhythm, our process.  We wouldn’t describe someone else as “Being a low-energy person” just because they were tired at ten in the evening. We’d say, “They’re tired now.”

The same applies to all these blanket traits. Caring, creativity, friendliness, worry — the seem to me less like fixed things inside us and more like tides or currents. Always part of us, always moving, rising and falling depending on conditions. Just as we understand our bodily or our physiological processes to work as independent but connected parts contributing to the whole, psychological traits can be considered with a similar lens. They're processes. Sometimes we’re in a caring mode. Sometimes we’re focused on something else entirely and caring isn’t where our attention is. Sometimes we feel creative and ideas flow. Sometimes our minds feel flat. We’re not being inconsistent or fraudulent. We’re being human — responding to what’s happening in and around us, moment by moment.

So why does this matter? If we believe we are a fixed non-angry person, then every time we do feel anger, we feel guilty or ashamed. We’re not just having an angry response — we worry we are angry and we wonder might what our problem is, or feel something is really wrong with us. Same thing if we think we’re not creative. When a creative impulse shows up, it might not compute. It might be dismissed, we might feel fraudulent, silly or just confused about who we actually are.

Freedom in motion

But if we understand ourselves as much more like a process than a static object, the confusion dissolves. Anger isn’t a character flaw — it’s a response happening right now. Creativity isn’t something we either have or don’t have — it’s something that’s available to us in certain moments, under certain conditions. It might not mean anything about our fundamental self. We’re just noticing: this is what’s happening in me right now. And that’s okay.

Understanding ourselves as a process rather than something fixed gives us valuable: autonomy. Some conditions are outside our control — we can’t control the motorbike on the road, or a stressful day at work. But understanding our own processes means we can at least recognise why we’re responding the way we are. Maybe that takes the sting out of it? It does for me. 

And crucially, there are conditions we can create. If we want more creativity in our lives, we can think about what conditions allow that to emerge — time, space, the right kind of mental rest, distance from demands. We can start experimenting. If we notice we’re depleted, we can recognise that and respond to it. I don’t think identity is fixed like a marble statue, something we chip away at to reveal the true or perfect version underneath. What seems truer to me is that we’re dynamic and responsive — shaped both by our internal processes and the world around us. I find this quietly liberating, because processes can, and do, shift when conditions shift.