People Never Change

But I will.

If you know me at all, even a little bit, even if you’ve just skimmed through my digital footprint, you would know I am a Suryakant Sawhney listener. Not the kind that just puts it on in the background, not the kind that has a few favorite tracks, but the kind that lets the music seep into their bones, that lets the lyrics shape the way the world feels. I don’t just listen to Lifafa/ PCRC,

I exist inside it.

A few months back, someone told me I look like a song from Lifafa and PCRC. It was meant as a compliment, I think.

Then they followed it up with something else: "I hope you never look like ‘People Never Change.’”

And I laughed. Not because it was funny. Not because I didn’t understand. But because I knew one thing.

People never change. But I will.

And it’s funny because we do not talk anymore, and I know it is certainly because I’ve started to look and feel like that very song they asked me not to look like.

Well that hurts.

But it’s okay.

I have always been fascinated by the way people try to change themselves, how they collect new habits like souvenirs, how they shift their wardrobes, how they start listening to new music just to fit into a room. I have done it too. God knows I have done it too. But it never really works, does it? Because deep down, you are the same person. The same voice in your head, the same instinct to run when things get too real, the same longing for something you can’t name.

But then there is me. And I refuse to be the same person I was yesterday. Or last week. Or last year.

There are days I wake up and decide I don’t want to be sentimental anymore. That I don’t want to keep finding poetry in pain. But then the sun hits my window in that golden way and some Lifafa song starts playing in my head, and suddenly, I am back where I started. A little softer. A little sharper. But still me.

Atleast I hope so.

The last person I interacted with who knew me from high school said I’ve changed alot.

“You give out so much big sister/ mom energy which is so hard to comprehend considering who you were”

Yeah.

And alot of other things which I won’t write about because I don’t want to.

I think about that phrase a lot. "People never change." And I wonder if it’s true. I have watched people try. I have watched people claim they’ve grown, that they’ve left behind the old versions of themselves like abandoned skin. But when the right song plays, when the right scent catches them off guard, they slip back into the person they were trying to outrun. And maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe that’s just proof that we were always whole to begin with.

But me? I refuse to be static. If nothing else, I want to be a person who changes. A person who grows. A person who sheds and regrows and learns and unlearns. I don’t want to be a fossil of my past self, trapped in the same loops, carrying the same weight just because it’s familiar. I want to surprise myself. I want to do things that make me uncomfortable, that stretch me, that make me look back and think, Wow, I didn’t know I had that in me.

I want to leave versions of myself behind like echoes in empty rooms, faint enough to remind me where I’ve been but never strong enough to pull me back. I want to be the kind of person who keeps moving forward, even if it means stepping into the unknown with shaking hands. Even if it means starting over a thousand times. Even if it means losing pieces of myself along the way.

And yet, I know, deep down, there will always be things I cannot change. The way I get restless at 2 a.m., staring at the ceiling like it holds answers. The way music cuts straight through me, making my chest ache for things I don’t even understand. The way I get attached to people who don’t even notice, who never asked to be a part of my inner world but somehow ended up there anyway. The way my heart keeps breaking for things I never even had, for possibilities that never unfolded, for the versions of reality that only ever existed in my head.

I tell myself change is good, that growth is necessary, but sometimes it feels like a war between who I am and who I want to be. Like I’m caught somewhere between nostalgia and ambition, between holding on and letting go. And maybe that’s just what it means to be human, to exist in the space between what stays and what shifts, between what we wish we could be and what we can’t help but remain.

But maybe that’s not a contradiction. Maybe that’s just what it means to be human. To change in ways that matter, and to stay the same in ways that make you, you.

A year from now, I will still be me, but not quite the same. The world will have left its fingerprints on me, subtle, invisible, but there all the same. The songs I play on repeat now might lose their weight, their meaning stretched thin over time, or they might become something else entirely, a reminder of a person I once was.

I won’t wake up one day and feel different.

One day, I’ll realize I no longer reach for the same comforts. The things that hurt will sting a little less. The questions that once felt urgent might no longer demand answers.

Some people will stay. Some won’t. The ones who leave will take parts of me with them, and maybe I’ll give those parts away willingly, or maybe I won’t notice until later, when I reach for them and find them missing. But I will not be empty. Life will fill the gaps in ways I can’t yet predict.

The places I stand now might become places I only visit in memory. Or maybe they’ll still be here, unchanged, while I’m the one who has shifted. The same streets, the same sky, but a different person looking up.

A year from now, I won’t be someone new, just someone who has lived a little more.

If I may:

“People never change, but I will

'Cause I never give a fuck

That I’ll never be enough

I have washed away my sins

So I never gotta face

Consequences”

-Peter Cat Recording Co.