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[quote=Anonymous]I think personality is more changeable than that. But perhaps it takes an inciting event to change you?

One major change my personality has made in the last 20 years is that I am far less judgmental than I used to be. I have a lot of empathy for different kinds of people and different kinds of problems people might have, even people who are unpleasant to me or do things that harm me. I don't just tolerate mistreatment, but I have a much deeper understanding of what causes this kind of behavior. This has helped make me a more resilient person, and to be less offended by hurtful behavior from others. I'm not a total Pollyanna, but I recognize now that a lot of people who do hurtful things are acting out of impulse or their own hurt or insecurity, and that helps me to let things roll off a little easier. Definitely didn't have that ability 10 or 20 years ago.

Another major change that I notice when I visit my family is that I used to be a really sarcastic person (and my family largely still is) but I've all but eliminated sarcasm from my repertoire. I see now that it's a protective reflex, a way of keeping emotional distance from feelings like sadness or anger that can sometimes be uncomfortable to just sit with. Now I just sit with them. But I wasn't raised to do that and it took a lot of work on myself to get to that point. Now I find sarcasm really unpleasant and will distance myself from someone who uses it a lot. Whereas 20 years ago I would have gravitated towards someone like this.

I think the biggest reasons these changes happened is that I had a few very challenging things happen in my life in my 30s and it caused me to re-evaluate how I approached other people and the world at large.[/quote]

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