‘I reserve the right to change my mind.’ We need this freedom. We learn, encounter what we did not previously understand and discover that something we once wanted no longer holds the same meaning. An employment contract may become untenable or a marriage may reach its end. We may come to reject a conviction we once defended. Holding people permanently to every earlier decision would deny the very possibility of development.
The difficulty begins when we extend that freedom into an entitlement to drop our commitments without much concern for the consequences. We change our minds, withdraw and expect the matter to end there. Meanwhile, other people are left carrying arrangements, responsibilities or expectations that our own word helped establish.
We may also change our account of another person’s intention or conduct months or years after an encounter. We are entitled to reconsider what happened, but how easily do we treat the interpretation we now prefer as the truth of the whole situation? As that account becomes more convincing, our own participation can disappear from it. The things we chose, encouraged, desired or agreed to become increasingly difficult to acknowledge.
Disown is the important word here. We can reconsider a decision and still own the fact that we made it. We can also reconsider it in a way that disowns the person we were and the realities we helped create. When that happens, our attempt to recover a satisfactory relationship with ourselves can impose a very different reality on someone else.
The Reconstructive School takes participation as foundational. Our decisions, promises, refusals and departures contribute to realities that other people also inhabit. We cannot understand our freedom solely through what we want now, because we have already been participating. Changing our relationship with that world does not make our earlier involvement disappear.
The question this article takes up
These questions have a philosophical history. Sartre’s account of bad faith includes the person who appeals to freedom and continual self-recreation to distance themselves from their past. Parfit’s discussion of successive selves examines how psychological connections change across a lifetime. Both are relevant to a difficulty that becomes quite personal: what relationship do we retain with someone we have been but no longer experience ourselves as being?
There are precedents in psychology and relationship research too. Bandura examines how people reconstruct their conduct, displace responsibility and minimise its consequences. The literature on exit, voice, loyalty and neglect distinguishes several responses to dissatisfaction, including staying while allowing a relationship to deteriorate. Leaving is therefore only one way that a person’s participation can change.
Williams’s account of agent-regret examines the particular relationship we can have with consequences in which we participated, even where we were not at fault. Walker’s work on moral repair connects acknowledging responsibility with undertaking reparative action. These distinctions matter because participation does not establish blame for everything that followed, and an expression of regret does not necessarily address what remains.
The focus here is how our changing understanding of ourselves can become a withdrawal from ownership, and what that withdrawal leaves for other people to carry. Someone can end their involvement while acknowledging and addressing its consequences. Another person can remain involved while refusing to examine their contribution. We need to look separately at departure, ownership and answerability.
Our revised account of the past also needs scrutiny. It may reveal something we could not see before, or it may obscure our agency and assign another person an intention we have not established. Telling that story is itself participation. It affects reputations, relationships and who is expected to take responsibility. We are answerable for what we do with an interpretation, as well as for the conduct we are interpreting.
The Withdrawal and Residue Model develops this inquiry within the Reconstructive School through engagement, ownership and answerability. It asks what changes when we withdraw, what remains and who carries it. The concern is how we can leave, correct a decision or become someone different without disowning the life through which we became.
A community of individuals distributed across time
The person looking back is no longer quite the person who participated. You are not just one person in a simple, static sense. You are a community of individuals distributed across time. The person who entered a relationship, the one who remained and the one who now looks back may differ considerably in what they understand, desire and find acceptable. Yet they belong to the same unfolding life, however uncomfortable that belonging becomes.
You may feel embarrassed by something an earlier version of you celebrated. A conviction you once defended now seems naïve, or you cannot understand what you found so attractive in a former relationship. You look back and feel disgusted, humiliated or ashamed. Perhaps the hardest thing to tolerate is the thought that you were a fool, especially if you once felt certain about what you were doing.
Our Metacontent, the intellectual substrate through which we make sense and come to know, changes. The assumptions and structures of understanding through which we encountered the world at one point in our lives do not remain untouched by what follows. We may deliberately examine them, but much also changes as we gain exposure, experience disappointment and live through situations we could not previously comprehend.
Our Being, our conduct (how we show up) changes with this. So do our actions, decision-making processes and priorities, including our relationship with normativity: what ought to be, what we consider worthy and what should guide our participation. What once seemed admirable may now offend our values. We are not fixed in a completed state of Being; we are continually Becoming.
The difficulty is what the person we have become does with the person we were. We may understand an earlier blindness more clearly, or we may turn our new understanding against that earlier self. We prosecute the person who did not possess distinctions we acquired later and become unwilling to recognise anything about them except their supposed failure.
Judging earlier conduct still matters. Some decisions should be regretted and some consequences require repair. But what did we know then, what could we reasonably have recognised and what pressures shaped the encounter? Those questions belong within the judgement. Arriving later does not, on its own, give the present self a complete understanding of the past.
Changing our minds and changing our account
‘I have changed my mind’ can mean several things. We may have revised a belief, decided to stop participating or changed our interpretation of what we previously did. One can lead to another, but they are different claims. Deciding to leave a relationship does not settle the truth of every judgement we now make about it.
A relationship may no longer suit us without our having been victimised by entering it. We may reject an organisation’s values after contributing willingly to its work. And our feelings about an encounter may change without establishing what the other person intended at the time. The present experience needs to be taken seriously, but it cannot do all the work of explaining the past.
We can also discover that our earlier understanding was wrong. Someone may have deceived us, or we may only later recognise pressure we could not name at the time. That possibility must remain open. An earlier account can be incomplete, and so can the account we give today; neither becomes reliable simply because it came first or last.
What, then, has become clearer, and what has become more convenient? The distinction can be difficult precisely because an interpretation that protects us may feel like the truth we have finally discovered. We need to examine what the new account explains and what we have had to leave out to sustain it.
Commitment and the consequences of departure
When we accept a role, enter a partnership or make promises within a marriage, other people begin to build on our word. Someone declines an alternative, takes on additional responsibilities or invests resources because they expect our contribution to remain available. We have helped create the circumstances in which they are now making their decisions.
We may later change our minds for good reasons. Those reasons deserve consideration, alongside what others have already undertaken because of our earlier decision. We do not return to a situation in which no promise was made simply because we no longer wish to fulfil it.
An employment relationship and a marriage involve different obligations. In either, a responsible departure may require notice, a conversation about shared responsibilities, a handover or some form of repair. Some situations demand immediate departure for safety, and accountability must never be used to keep someone exposed to harm. Where there is room to address the consequences, however, our wish to leave does not make that work disappear.
We do not have to remain in a relationship indefinitely to prove that we are responsible. Nor must we establish that the other person is a villain before we are allowed to leave. We may have chosen the relationship sincerely and now want a different life. Owning that can be more difficult than finding someone to blame.
What happens to shared life if every change in feeling dissolves the significance of our word? Other people have to keep checking, protecting themselves and preparing to absorb whatever we leave unfinished. A family, a business or a community cannot build much continuity under those conditions. The freedom to change our minds still operates within the relationships our commitments have helped form.
Intimacy, consent and retrospective interpretation
Consider an intimate or sexual relationship. Someone participates in sexual intercourse with consent at the time, then months or years later looks back differently. A breakup, a change in values or a new understanding of themselves alters how they interpret the other person’s intention or conduct. They may feel ashamed of what they wanted, humiliated by what followed or disgusted by the version of themselves they no longer wish to own.
Looking back may reveal that what was described as consent involved coercion, incapacity or a violation of an expressed limit. That is a different matter from wishing a freely chosen encounter had not happened. Equally, consent to an activity does not make everything about the surrounding relationship honest or harmless. Each claim has to be examined for what it actually concerns.
Later regret does not, by itself, establish that consent was absent. Earlier consent does not settle every question about another person’s conduct either. We need to return to what happened, what was communicated and what has since become known, rather than allowing one of these facts to stand in for the whole encounter.
‘I now recognise something I could not recognise then’ is different from ‘I no longer want to own the person who participated then’. From within distress, we may struggle to tell them apart. Yet the difference matters greatly when our interpretation becomes a claim about another person’s conduct.
Once a relationship has ended badly, we may begin to reinterpret its whole history through the ending. Affection becomes manipulation, and desire we shared becomes something that happened only to us. We judge earlier encounters against a future we hoped for but did not get. Because things did not work out as we envisioned, we begin to assume that the other person’s intention must have been corrupt from the beginning.
There may indeed have been manipulation, dishonesty or a promise knowingly broken. There may also have been a misunderstanding, or two people who participated sincerely and later disappointed one another. We have to leave these possibilities available for examination. The account that best protects our present identity is not necessarily the one that most accurately describes what happened.
Consent, assertiveness and the meaning of our yeses and nos
We also need to examine what we understood and communicated before the disappointment. What did our yes mean, what did we decline and what did we expect? We can enter an undertaking without becoming clear about these matters, then hold someone else responsible for an understanding we never established together.
The Being Framework provides the following ontological distinction:
Assertiveness is when you express yourself effectively and stand up for your point of view while also being respectful of others. It is the willingness to express your thoughts and feelings and communicate your needs and expectations firmly and directly while being considerate of others and aware of any subsequent consequences of being assertive. Assertiveness is being resolute, straight, firm and effective.
A healthy relationship with assertiveness indicates that you are predominately straight and unambiguous in your communication with others. You rarely resort to threats or attempt to manipulate outcomes and are transparent with your motives. You are bold in communicating your and others’ needs and expectations in terms of the outcomes required or expected. You are comfortable letting others know how you feel and express yourself without emotional outbursts.
An unhealthy relationship with assertiveness indicates that you may be unreasonably submissive, agreeable or aggressive, or that you predominantly rely on manipulation and domination to get your way, express yourself and communicate with others. You may frequently go along with what others decide to avoid conflict. You may also use inappropriate humour, sarcasm, teasing or underhanded comments to manipulate, bully, control or put others down. Alternatively, you may frequently threaten or use the tone of your voice to dominate or exert your will on others. As a result, they may consider you manipulative or dominating, even though that is not always your intention. Your conversations may quickly spiral or escalate emotionally while issues remain unresolved.
Reference: Tashvir, A. (2021). BEING (p. 471). Engenesis Publications.
This distinction asks us to consider how we express ourselves and how we treat the other person’s position. We can conceal what we think through submission, or make it difficult for someone else to speak through aggression. Firmness has to remain considerate and attentive to consequences. Otherwise, what we call assertiveness can become another way of imposing our will.
A real yes needs to mean something we can identify. What are we agreeing to, and within what limits? Accepting one task does not make us endlessly available. Agreeing to an intimate encounter does not establish consent to every activity or promise a continuing relationship. We may hope it will become something more, but our hope is not automatically a commitment the other person has made.
A real no needs room to be expressed and respected. We do not have to produce an impressive explanation before a refusal counts. If declining brings threats, punishment or persistent pressure, we also have to question how freely a subsequent yes is given. Respecting the other person includes being willing to hear an answer we did not want.
An honest ‘I am unsure’ matters too. Uncertainty should be available for expression without being converted into agreement. In a sexual encounter, ambiguity calls for clarification and a pause rather than an assumption that participation may continue. Silence, passivity, freezing or difficulty articulating a refusal must not be treated as consent.
These distinctions allow us to examine communication without making consent dependent on perfect assertiveness. Someone who struggles to speak, becomes frightened or cannot clearly articulate a boundary has not thereby authorised another person’s conduct. A distressed, hesitant or emotionally expressed refusal remains a refusal. Respect for a boundary does not depend on polished delivery, and responsibility for seeking and respecting consent cannot be transferred entirely onto the person whose communication is less confident.
There are also situations in which we have the freedom, capacity and opportunity to speak, yet avoid clarifying what matters to us. We say yes to gain approval, to appear generous or because we hope the encounter will lead somewhere we have not discussed. The agreement may be freely given, even though we have not properly examined our reasons. Later, we need to distinguish what we communicated from what we privately hoped would follow.
An employee accepts extra work and quietly expects a promotion. A partner agrees to an arrangement while hoping the other person will eventually realise they wanted something different. In an intimate relationship, someone freely chooses an encounter and treats it privately as the beginning of a commitment. When the expected outcome does not arrive, we may accuse the other person of breaking an agreement that was never mutually established.
The other person may have encouraged that expectation or made a promise they did not intend to honour. We need to examine that too. An expectation cultivated by someone else is different from one we developed without their knowledge, and our disappointment alone cannot tell us which occurred.
We project responsibility when we make another person carry the burden of clarity we had not developed or communication we had avoided. We attribute to them knowledge of an intention, condition or expectation that we neither articulated nor otherwise made reasonably apparent. We did not establish an understanding together, yet our later story presents them as having knowingly betrayed it.
We may believe this story quite sincerely. ‘They should have known’ feels obvious when we assume that what was clear within our own understanding must also have been clear to them. This is a problem of Metacontent as well as communication. Assertiveness gives the other person a chance to encounter our position before an unspoken expectation becomes resentment.
Ownership may begin with a difficult acknowledgement: ‘I said yes while hoping for something I did not communicate’, or ‘I agreed before I understood my limits’. We can acknowledge this and still hold another person to account for their wrongdoing. We can also leave. What changes is the honesty of the account from which we now act.
We remain entitled to change our minds after giving a genuine yes. In certain domains such as a sexual encounter, that change is expected to be respected immediately. Across other undertakings, changing our participation may require communication, renegotiation or appropriate repair. In either case, we need to distinguish changing our present position from rewriting what was previously agreed, hoped for or never established between us.
When hurt becomes proof
In some situations, we choose to feel hurt. The wording is deliberate, and its meaning needs to be precise. Pain, grief, fear and distress can arise without our choosing them, and we do not exercise complete voluntary control over our emotional lives. Telling every injured person that they chose their injury would itself avoid the reality of what happened to them.
The choice concerns what we do with an interpretation of the hurt. We can keep returning to a story in which we have no agency and another person must resolve a conflict we have with ourselves. We seek confirmation of that story, resist anything that complicates it and come to depend on it for our sense of who we are.
Choosing to feel hurt, in this qualified sense, means participating in and reinforcing a particular relationship with what happened. Humiliation becomes proof that somebody intended to humiliate us. Feeling used establishes, in our account, that they intended to use us. Our shame becomes something they must carry. We need to recognise the feeling without treating its explanation as beyond question.
Denial, projection, blame and sudden withdrawal can spare us an encounter with something we do not want to own. These compensatory mechanisms need not involve a calculated lie. A story can protect us so effectively that we become sincerely convinced by it and no longer recognise what it allows us to avoid.
The shadow we disown
What are we disowning? It may be our wish to be chosen, our need for approval or our willingness to overlook uncertainty. It may be the fact that we wanted something that now offends our values. Sometimes we cannot tolerate the simpler admission that we took a risk, misunderstood someone or hoped for an outcome that did not occur. We then have to do something with the part of ourselves we refuse to acknowledge.
Jung’s account of the shadow is relevant here. In Aion, recognising aspects of ourselves that we resist acknowledging is part of the work of self-knowledge. His discussion of projection also examines why the source of an emotional difficulty can appear to reside entirely in another person. These ideas ask something of our own inquiry; they do not establish that someone else is projecting because we dislike their account.
We may turn inward and beat ourselves up, victimise ourselves or sabotage our future because we cannot bear who we were. The present self prosecutes the earlier self, returning to its mistakes and treating punishment as evidence of moral seriousness. We keep that version of ourselves alive chiefly to condemn it, while learning very little about how to live differently.
Read through an archetypal lens, this resembles a sacrifice. Some part of the self must be condemned so that the rest can claim distance from it. We may feel that our suffering proves we have taken responsibility, even while avoiding the understanding or repair the situation requires. Punishing ourselves can become another way of remaining occupied without addressing what happened.
Or we turn outward and manufacture a convincing account in which someone else carries what we cannot tolerate in ourselves. The scapegoat is the relevant archetypal figure here: a person made to bear what others disown. Jungian writing has examined this relationship between scapegoating and the shadow.
We may scapegoat another person to wash out guilt we have manufactured within ourselves. We condemn an earlier desire or decision according to our present values, then try to relocate its authorship. Someone else becomes responsible for the existence of the self we now reject, and we seek relief by making that person carry it.
The story does not have to invent every event to distort the encounter. We can leave out our initiative, minimise our encouragement or remove the uncertainty that existed at the time. We can also attribute an intention we have no adequate basis to establish. Much of what we say may be recognisable, while the account as a whole makes our own participation disappear.
An accusation is not false because it emerges after a breakup, and distress does not establish projection. Someone who recognises harm late should not be disbelieved merely because recognition took time. Such shortcuts would repeat the very failure under examination: deciding what happened according to the story we prefer.
We need to stay precise about whose participation and whose wrongdoing we are examining. A person may have been harmed and still have aspects of their involvement to understand. Acknowledging those aspects does not transfer another person’s wrongdoing onto them. Responsibility has to remain proportionate to agency, knowledge and conduct, rather than being allocated according to who tells the most convincing story.
The ontology of withdrawal and avoidance
An ontology of withdrawal asks what is happening beneath the act of leaving. Someone stops answering, resigns, ends a relationship or refuses further discussion. We can see the departure, but what are they withdrawing from? We need to examine the way of being through which leaving comes to appear necessary, justified or sufficient.
We may leave because we have understood the situation more clearly. We may also leave because continued contact would make something difficult to deny. The other person remembers what we wanted, what we promised or how we contributed. Encountering their account threatens the explanation through which we have made ourselves comfortable with the outcome.
Sometimes we withdraw from the person who remembers our participation. Their memory may be incomplete or mistaken, but it interrupts our claim to sole authorship of the past. They recall a conversation, an initiative or an expression of desire that does not fit the person we now want to be. We may find it easier to remove them from our lives than to examine the difference.
Leaving changes our availability; it does not necessarily resolve anything about our earlier participation. Avoidance can also continue while we remain physically present. We may be busy, articulate and apparently engaged, yet organise ourselves around never having to make the acknowledgement that would change the situation.
We explain ourselves at length but avoid one precise admission. We seek reassurance from people who have not heard the details that might complicate their support. Even our insistence that we have moved on can depend on keeping a particular account intact. What looks like engagement may be sustained effort to keep something from being encountered.
‘I have changed my mind’ can then close a conversation that still requires our participation. We state a present decision as though it settles earlier commitments and unresolved consequences. Our freedom to choose differently becomes a reason to refuse examination of what we previously chose.
The Withdrawal and Residue Model
The Withdrawal and Residue Model gives this inquiry a structure within the Reconstructive School. Withdrawal changes our engagement with a reality, but it also affects who carries what remains. The model distinguishes engagement, ownership and answerability so that leaving, acknowledging our participation and addressing its consequences do not get treated as the same thing.
Engagement concerns our present involvement in an activity, relationship or undertaking. We may reduce, suspend or end that involvement for many reasons. The change in engagement is observable, although its meaning cannot be established from the outward action alone.
Ownership concerns our willingness to acknowledge our actual participation, including its limits and conditions. Someone can leave an undertaking while continuing to recognise what they chose, promised or contributed. They can also remain involved while minimising, distorting or disowning their contribution.
Answerability concerns our willingness to encounter and appropriately address the consequences connected with that participation. A person may acknowledge, ‘Yes, I made that commitment’, while refusing to discuss what its abandonment now means. Another may undertake practical repair while continuing to tell a distorted story about their involvement. Ownership and answerability support one another, but neither can be assumed merely because the other appears present.
We can withdraw in two directions. We end our engagement with an undertaking, and we may also withdraw from ownership of having participated in it. These movements need not occur together or in a fixed order. Someone can leave responsibly, while another stays and refuses to acknowledge an important part of their involvement.
Temporal disowning names the attempt by the present self to exclude an earlier self from the ownership of its unfolding life. We do more than disagree with an earlier decision. We resist recognising that the person who wanted, chose or encouraged it belongs to the life we now inhabit. That earlier self becomes someone we would rather treat as a stranger.
We may condemn that self as an internal scapegoat or reassign their participation to somebody else. Having withdrawn from a relationship, we attempt a second withdrawal from being someone who participated in it. Revising an interpretation does not, on its own, establish temporal disowning. The issue is whether we remain willing to examine our participation as our understanding changes.
The demand of encounter
Something often changes the demand of participation before we consider withdrawing. A commitment becomes costly, a disagreement can no longer be avoided or new information changes our judgement. We may discover that we cannot carry what the undertaking now requires. The model calls this the demand of encounter: something in reality asks to be recognised, decided, carried or addressed.
What we encounter may be a genuine limit or danger, a consequence of our own conduct or a threat to our understanding of ourselves. These can exist together. We may need to leave and still be avoiding part of the situation. We may have a justified grievance and still be unwilling to examine something about our participation.
Our Metacontent shapes how we understand the demand. ‘I made a commitment that I can no longer fulfil’ keeps the commitment available for discussion. ‘Their expectation that I fulfil it proves they are controlling’ may turn the request for accountability into an accusation. Either account has to be tested against what happened, including whether an agreement existed and how the other person is behaving now.
The strength of our conviction cannot settle whether we are responding to reality or protecting an interpretation from it. We need to examine what the account allows us to acknowledge and what it keeps out. Its response to information that complicates it may tell us more than how certain we feel when repeating it.
What remains after we leave
Residue is what remains unresolved, materially consequential or historically relevant after our engagement changes. The term does not presume guilt. It asks us to look at what is still there after we have announced that we are leaving and who must now deal with it.
Practical residue may include unfinished work, shared resources, care arrangements or commitments others relied upon. Relational residue may involve damaged trust, uncertainty or expectations that need clarification. Interpretive residue concerns the account of what happened, including disputed intentions, conflicting recollections or the disappearance of someone’s participation from the story.
We leave a role and feel relieved while colleagues absorb the unfinished work. We adopt an account that relieves our shame while somebody else carries an unsupported accusation. Or we leave with a clear acknowledgement of our participation and arrangements for what still needs attention. The question is who carries what remains and whether there is a reasonable basis for that allocation.
Residue does not automatically establish that departure was wrong. Some losses cannot be prevented, some expectations were unreasonable and some consequences belong to the person experiencing them. Another person’s disappointment does not, by itself, create a continuing entitlement to our participation.
Historical ownership and continuing obligation must also be distinguished. The fact that we participated cannot be erased, but practical responsibilities can be completed or settled. A departure can be responsible even when people disagree about it or continue to feel pain. What matters is whether we have honestly addressed what can reasonably be asked of us, rather than demanding that departure remove every consequence.
Refusing to acknowledge residue can also keep a conflict going. The unresolved work or disputed account generates further pressure, which we then take as evidence that we were right to leave. Each consequence of avoiding the matter becomes another reason to avoid it. We become less available while the reality we left remains unresolved.
Reconstruction without erasure
The story we tell about an event is part of our participation in the world. It can affect another person’s reputation, livelihood and relationships, as well as their understanding of themselves. Within the Reconstructive School, this means that responsibility extends to how we tell the story. We do not become spectators merely because the events we describe are in the past.
Reconstruction requires us to examine why an interpretation has become attractive and what we can actually stand behind. Meta-awareness allows us to question the way we are seeing. Our relationship with normativity affects the standards by which we judge an earlier self, and our way of Being affects whether we can acknowledge what the inquiry reveals. Understanding these distinctions does not guarantee that we will live them.
We also have to consider capacity. A person may not know how to carry the fact that they wanted an encounter, were disappointed by it and have legitimate concerns about another person’s conduct, while also needing to examine their own part. Holding these realities together can exceed what they currently know how to do. Wanting an honest account does not automatically give us the capacity to sustain one.
A simpler story may bring relief when that complexity becomes intolerable. We make one person wholly innocent and the other wholly guilty, or condemn an earlier self so that the present one can recover a sense of innocence. Capacity develops in part through learning to remain with what is difficult to acknowledge without immediately resolving it through denial, self-punishment or blame.
A reconstructive response begins with what can now be addressed. We may need to acknowledge a promise, correct an account, recognise harm or make arrangements for unfinished responsibilities. Sometimes the necessary action is a clear limit. Where direct contact is unsafe or inappropriate, we need another way of addressing what remains; answerability cannot require renewed exposure to harm.
There is a danger in turning this inquiry into a demand for someone else’s confession. We can call another person avoidant, shadowed or incapable to protect ourselves from examining their account. That too may serve a compensatory function. The person making an accusation, the person rejecting it and anyone offering an explanation all remain participants whose conduct can be examined.
A more integrated account might hold several truths together: ‘I participated. There were things I did not understand. Some of what I chose no longer reflects my values. Some of what happened may have harmed me. I need to distinguish what I know from what I now infer. I can change direction while remaining willing to examine my part.’
We can give such an account and still refuse further participation, leave for good reasons or recognise that serious wrongdoing occurred. We also make room for regret that does not need a perpetrator and grief that does not require an accusation. Learning becomes possible without destroying an earlier self or making another person responsible for everything we no longer wish to own.
We do not have to remain loyal to every belief, commitment or form of participation we have entered. We do have to examine what we have helped create and how we now speak about it. Changing our minds does not, by itself, release us from responsibility or give us sole authority over what the past means.
The community of individuals distributed across time needs some capacity to speak across its differences. The person we are today must be able to challenge the person we were and still recognise that person as belonging to our history. We can refuse to give the past control over our future without pretending it was never ours.
We remain free to change our minds. The question is what we do with that freedom when the person we have become no longer wants to own the person who participated. We can examine that history and act differently, or spend our lives arranging an escape from it. Becoming does not remove the need for integrity; it asks us to remain answerable as we change.