How not to reinvent yourself

MANILA, Philippines - Most people only have three opportunities for a fresh start  high school, college, and work life. Here’s my case: Graduation is basically an open invitation to a forced metamorphosis. By all means, take it. But the art of reinvention is a tricky one. Nine times out of 10, it’ll end up backfiring.

Emma Stone’s character tried it in Easy A, which led to disastrous results. Her co-star Amanda Bynes tried it in real life, and we all know how that went. In the Philippines, where everyone knows everyone by fewer than six degrees of separation, a flawless uncool-to-cool transition is almost impossible. But that doesn’t stop a few misguided people from trying anyway.

If you’re dead set on a fresh start, maybe you can learn from their mistakes. Here’s what you shouldn’t do:

1. Change your name. I’ll be honest. I still don’t know where Snoop Dogg — whoops, Snoop Lion — is going with this. And I won’t pretend that, when I was accepted into law school, I wasn’t tempted to change my name to Giselle... Woods. There’s just something unnatural about giving yourself a new nickname. I’m pretty sure there’s a rule against it somewhere in the unspoken social code.

Calling yourself T-Bone isn’t going to make you the cool kid on the block. It just makes you the kid who has no idea who he is and tried to fix that by giving himself a new nickname that just isn’t going to stick.

2. Let your new friends recreate you. Every decade has a cautionary tale with this very premise. The early 2000s had Mean Girls. The late ‘90s had Jawbreaker. And the ‘80s had Heathers. Well, sort of.

Don’t give someone else a reason to contemptuously say, “I, like, invented her, you know what I mean?” while you walk around in clothes that aren’t really you, speak in a way that isn’t really you, and act like someone who isn’t you at all. By allowing other people to dictate who you are and manipulate how you speak and act, you’re allowing them to walk all over you.

Queen bees don’t become queen bees by following the rules set by other people. They make the rules. And if you think there’s only one definition of an “in-crowd,” as we’ve all been led to believe by almost every badly-written teen movie, then you have a very narrow perception of what it means to be cool.

3. Disassociate yourself from old friends. When you say “I need to make new friends,” make sure you say it for the right reasons. Say it because your old friends are toxic and you want to stay away from them. Say it because you think you need more friends. Say it because you and your friends are starting at new jobs soon, so you realistically won’t have much time for each other. But don’t say it because you think your old friends are at the bottom of the social ladder and you think you deserve “better.” Please, don’t be that guy.

 4. Make drastic changes. Let’s not pretend we didn’t go through some sort of emo or punk rock phase in seventh grade, but if you come into the first day of school or work pretending to be something you’re not, it’s really not kosher.

It’s important to be genuinely interested in your new interests. It’s the same principle behind wearing a band shirt — people are always going to find a way to prove you’re really a fan. So no, don’t wear that Guns N’ Roses tank top and say, “Yeah, I love I Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing.”

5. Use a label to define yourself. You’re doing yourself a disservice by automatically assuming that a guy who plays sports is a jock, and a girl with her nose always in a book is a nerd. People are much more complex than their identifiers.

Don’t be the good girl gone cliché and blindly choose an ill-conceived stereotype then pattern yourself after it. If there’s something we’ve learned from American television, many jocks have that sensitive side to them, and many nerdy girls magically become gorgeous when you take off their glasses — and even those are terrible stereotypes that we shouldn’t put much stock in, except to prove that people usually are more than what they seem to be.

6. Deny all allegations about your past. Remember that embarrassing thing you did two years ago? While you might lose sleep over it, chances are, nobody else will.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to reinvent yourself. In fact, it takes a certain kind of maturity to realize that there are things about yourself that you want to change. But most people go about reinvention like a little girl putting on mom’s lipstick and too-big high-heels would; it’s a great way to fall flat on your face, and it usually makes for funny photos you’ll regret five years from now.

Try hard but don’t be trying hard. Reinvention is more about starting out on the right foot, and less about creating a persona for yourself that isn’t really you. And the biggest mistake you can make is addressing only the superficial parts of you that you don’t like and thinking that a new wardrobe or new friends is the solution to what’s usually a non-issue. Beyoncé, the preeminent Queen B, gave great advice on the subject: “I talk like this ‘cause I can back it up.”