Sometimes reinventing yourself changes your life. Sometimes it costs you something you don’t understand until decades later.
The Price of Reinventing Yourself: What I Lost While Becoming Someone Else
I reinvented myself when I was fifteen years old.
And I was remarkably good at it.
Before high school, I was socially invisible.
I wasn’t particularly unhappy. I wasn’t bullied. I didn’t hate myself. In fact, thanks largely to my parents and grandparents, I had pretty decent self-esteem.
I was just…unremarkable.
Then high school approached.
And I decided that wasn’t going to work for me anymore.
So I created a new Jon-David.
There was only one problem.
The new Jon-David wasn’t entirely true.
The Summer I Became Someone Else
The transformation was impressive, if I do say so myself.
My braces came off.
I’d grown several inches.
My freckles were fading.
I’d learned to cut my own hair, and I feathered it into something resembling John Travolta’s in Saturday Night Fever.
And somewhere along the way, I decided I wouldn’t just steal John Travolta’s hair.
I’d borrow a little of his swagger too.
When I walked into high school in the fall of 1978, almost nobody recognized me.
It felt fantastic.
For the first time in my life, I had reinvented myself.
And I liked the new guy.
Jon-David as a teenager during the high school years that inspired his story about reinvention and identity.
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“There’s a difference between changing your life and abandoning yourself.”
— Jon-David
There Was Someone the New Me Couldn’t Take Along
His name was Kyle.
Kyle was my first boyfriend.
We’d been together secretly through junior high school.
He was handsome and athletic, with surfer hair, a permanent tan and one of those smiles that makes you understand why some people don’t have to work particularly hard at being liked.
Kyle was also happy.
And sincere.
Most importantly, he loved me.
Near the end of junior high, he actually told me so.
And I told him we were too young to be in love.
What we had was just sex, I said.
Even writing those words now hurts a little.
Because it wasn’t true.
Kyle wasn’t the problem.
Love wasn’t the problem.
Love simply didn’t fit the person I had decided to become.
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My Biggest High School Project Was Me
I’ve always been good at projects.
Writing a book.
Starting a business.
Producing something.
Building something.
Give me a goal and I can become extraordinarily focused.
Unfortunately, at fifteen years old, my big project was Jon-David.
I wanted to be popular.
I wanted people to know who I was.
I wanted to walk into a room and matter.
And, whether consciously or not, I understood something else:
Being openly gay was not part of the plan.
This was 1978.
So I didn’t just reinvent my hair, clothes and personality.
I reinvented my sexuality for public consumption.
I started dating girls.
Lots of girls.
I Created a Ladies’ Man Who Didn’t Exist
This is where the story becomes both horrible and hilarious.
I developed a strategy.
The more desirable the girl I dated, I reasoned, the more desirable I would appear.
I essentially created my own teenage social-climbing algorithm.
Date girl.
Become slightly more popular.
Break up.
Date more popular girl.
Repeat.
Yes.
I was awful.
And no, being young doesn’t entirely excuse it.
But here’s the fascinating part when I look back:
The performance worked.
People believed I was a ladies’ man.
Girls believed it.
Guys believed it.
My school believed it.
And perhaps most importantly:
My mother believed it.
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Sometimes the People Who Love Us Love the Person We Show Them
My mother had an idea of what my future looked like.
I’d grow up.
I’d meet a woman.
I’d get married.
I’d have children.
I’d become the man she imagined I was becoming.
And suddenly, in high school, I appeared to be doing exactly that.
I had girlfriends.
I was social.
I was confident.
I was a gentleman.
I was popular.
From my mother’s perspective, everything was going beautifully.
And I loved making her happy.
That’s something I understand differently now.
I wasn’t simply hiding that I was gay because I was afraid of what other kids might think.
Part of my performance protected my relationship with my mother.
She liked who she thought I was.
And I liked being liked by her.
So I kept giving her that person.
That’s the Trouble With Reinvention
We talk about reinvention as though it’s always healthy.
New year.
New career.
New body.
New city.
New you.
Burn the old life down and become the person you were always meant to be.
I’ve reinvented myself many times in my life.
Some of those reinventions saved me.
But I’ve learned something.
There’s a difference between changing your life and abandoning yourself.
Real reinvention expands you.
False reinvention edits you.
It removes the inconvenient parts.
The embarrassing parts.
The vulnerable parts.
The parts that might keep you from getting what you think you want.
And sometimes we become so good at performing the edited version that everybody believes it.
Including the people closest to us.
Kyle Saw the Person Underneath
Kyle and I eventually found our way back to each other briefly in high school.
By then, I knew.
I was gay.
There wasn’t really any confusion about that.
But I was also becoming popular.
And I wasn’t willing to give that up.
Kyle understood something I couldn’t yet admit.
There wasn’t room for him in the life I was constructing.
So we said goodbye.
He eventually met a woman named Cathy.
They married.
They built a life together.
And I went on with mine.
For years, I thought of Kyle as one of my great regrets.
The one I pushed away.
The person who loved me before I learned how much easier life could sometimes be when you gave people the version of yourself they wanted to see.
But that’s not quite how I understand Kyle anymore.
Maybe First Love Isn’t Supposed to Last
We romanticize first love.
We wonder:
What if?
What if I’d stayed?
What if I’d chosen differently?
What if I’d been brave enough?
What if he was the one who got away?
But getting older has taught me that maybe those are the wrong questions.
Kyle went on to have a life.
So did I.
The importance of a relationship isn’t necessarily measured by whether it lasts forever.
Some people enter our lives to show us something.
Kyle showed me what it felt like to be loved before I knew how to receive love.
That’s different from losing “the one.”
And it took me decades to understand the difference.
The People We Were Aren’t Gone
While writing How I Killed My Mother, something unexpected happened.
People from my past began returning to my life—not always literally, but emotionally.
Relationships I thought were finished suddenly looked unfinished.
Kyle.
Chuck.
My father.
My mother.
Even the younger versions of myself I’d judged, defended, laughed at or tried to forget.
I began seeing them differently.
And I began seeing myself differently too.
Maybe that’s one of the gifts of getting older.
You don’t get to go backward and change your choices.
But you can go backward and understand them.
And sometimes understanding the person who made the mistake is the closest thing we get to changing the past.
I Forgive That Fifteen-Year-Old Boy
I don’t particularly like what I did to Kyle.
I don’t particularly like how I treated some of those girls either.
But I understand that kid now.
He wanted to be admired.
He wanted to succeed.
He wanted his mother to be proud of him.
He wanted to control how the world saw him.
And he hadn’t yet learned that being loved as someone else isn’t nearly as satisfying as being loved as yourself.
I know that now.
It only took me a few decades.
And a memoir.
And a podcast.
And apparently my dead mother getting involved.
But that’s another story.
Sometimes we don’t lose our first love. We lose the person we were before we stopped believing we deserved it.
— Jon-David
Listen to Episode 05: “First Love and Dating Girls”
In Episode 05 of How I Killed My Mother, I tell the much funnier, messier and more outrageous version of how I reinvented myself in high school, constructed my reputation as a teenage ladies’ man, and walked away from my first boyfriend, Kyle.
Listen to How I Killed My Mother and join my mailing list at HowIKilledMyMother.com for new stories, bonus material and updates about the upcoming memoir.
And maybe ask yourself:
Have you ever reinvented yourself into someone everyone else loved—but who wasn’t entirely you?
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