That’s just how I am
There’s a line that ends a conversation faster than any other. Five words, no particular tone, often a half-smile trailing behind it.
“That’s just how I am.”
After that, there’s nothing left to say. Whoever hears it nods, and everyone moves on. It works, and fair enough: you don’t argue with what a person is.
I’ve been hearing it a lot lately. Around me, in conversations where I thought we were figuring something out together, and it wears me down more than its content can explain. It took me a while to understand why. It’s not that the line is false, it’s that it shuts me out: it informs me there’s nothing to be done here, that my presence changes nothing, and that we can move on. It’s hard to stay in a room where you’ve just been told you serve no purpose.
Notice that it never shows up on its own. Nobody says “that’s just how I am” about something that costs nothing; you don’t use it to explain that you like coffee or prefer the sea to the mountains. It appears when something has just hit a snag: a reproach, an invitation, or a question that cut a little too close. It always comes as a reply, which makes it a door being closed rather than information being offered.
Two lines that sound the same
That said, there are versions of “that’s just how I am” I find genuinely beautiful. Someone who took fifteen years to understand they can’t stand noise, who tried the open-plan offices, the earplugs, the staggered hours, the three-hundred-euro headphones, and who finally says: there it is, that’s how I am, I’ll organize my life differently. That’s not giving up; it’s a map of the territory, drawn by hand after walking every inch of it. Then there are the others, the ones that come out about a subject never once approached, and those say nothing at all. The problem is that they sound identical. Same words, same tone, same effect on the listener: the conversation stops. From the outside there’s no telling them apart, and from the inside, often not much better.
What separates them isn’t in the line
A limit you’ve discovered has a past. Attempts, failures, adjustments, a moment when you understood it was no longer worth pushing. It arrived at the end of something. A limit you’ve decreed has nothing behind it: it arrived all at once, often early, and often from somewhere else, because someone said it about us one day and we kept it without checking. Which leaves you one rough test, to be taken as exactly that: does the line come at the beginning or at the end? After trying, or instead of trying? It’s not infallible; sometimes you know without ever having tested it, and you’re right, because the body knows things before we have the words to justify them. But between knowing and deciding, there’s a difference you can at least go and look at.
The case that complicates everything
There’s a third case, trickier than the other two. Some limits are real, documented, sometimes named by a professional. You don’t invent them, and they don’t dissolve through sheer goodwill. Except a real limit can be used in two ways: it can say what you’re organizing your life around, or it can say there’s nothing left to organize. The same finding, once as a starting point and once as a period. Knowing exactly where the problem lies is usually the beginning of something, and sometimes it’s what ends the search altogether. That’s the only thing that interests me here: not whether the finding is valid, but what gets done with it afterward.
The line manufactures its own evidence
And then there’s what happens once the line is in place: you stop collecting anything that would contradict it. Worse, you manufacture what confirms it, and the smarter you are, the better you are at that game. Someone who has decided they’re not sociable arrives at the party already withdrawn, speaks little, keeps to the edges, leaves early, and goes home with one more piece of evidence. The line has produced its own material. That’s what makes it so hard to dislodge: it doesn’t just describe, it organizes. And it changes nature along the way. At first it describes a behavior, I can’t do this, something that happened a certain number of times. A few years later it has become a name: I’m someone who can’t do this. Between the two, nobody decided anything; time simply passed. And once the shift has happened, it’s almost impossible to remember that the line wasn’t a name to begin with.
What it shuts off
There’s something more troubling than the subject itself. “That’s just how I am” doesn’t only close the question it’s aimed at; it removes an entire category from the field of what deserves a second look. Someone who has decided they’re not good with their hands never again wonders whether they’d enjoy it. They don’t slow down in front of the workshop, they never catch themselves thinking “hm, what about that?” The line doesn’t say I tried and it’s not for me; it says there’s no point in looking. It shuts the question off before it has time to arise, and a question that never arises leaves no trace: you don’t remember not having been curious.
That’s where the price sits, and it’s hard to see, because what’s missing isn’t the thing you turned down, it’s everything it would have opened up behind it. The people you’d have met there, what you’d have discovered about yourself by rubbing up against it, the version of your life that branched off at that fork. None of it ever presents itself as a loss, since it’s precisely what you never went to see. The cost of a limit you’ve discovered is known: you know what you left behind, you weighed it. The cost of a limit you’ve decreed stays invisible, and that’s what makes it expensive.
A description that never gets updated
“That’s just how I am” is spoken in the present tense, but in many mouths it’s a past tense that forgot to conjugate itself. A forty-five-year-old defending a trait they spotted in themselves at twelve. A person describing, with precision, someone they haven’t been for a long time, simply because nobody ever updated the description, starting with themselves. We keep the file exactly as it was written, without asking who wrote it or when, and we go on presenting it as an accurate description of the present.
What the line protects
It would be easy to say it protects laziness or a lack of courage. That’s sometimes true, and mostly it’s too easy an answer. It also protects against exhaustion, because change costs something, and there are stretches when the energy simply isn’t there; saying “that’s just how I am” is then an honest way of saving what’s left. Above all, it protects an identity. On certain subjects, questioning yourself doesn’t mean adjusting a behavior; it means losing a piece of who you are. If I’m not the discreet one, the dependable one, the one who never asks for anything, then who am I? Plenty of people hold on to the line for that reason, and it isn’t cowardice. It’s expensive.
Three ways to reopen the line
The line doesn’t need to be disproved. It just needs to be pinned to something: a who, a when.
“That’s just how I am”: with whom?
Few traits survive a change of company. That impatience: you have it with your mother and not with your friends. That silence in meetings: it’s gone when you’re the one doing the inviting. What you took for a characteristic is often a behavior, yours, inside a specific system, in response to specific people. That doesn’t make the line false; it makes it local, dependent on the system it occurs in. And a local limit is worked around differently from a limit that’s part of your nature. We like to believe there’s a true self somewhere with masks layered on top, depending on circumstances. It’s more troubling than that: there is no bare version, only situated ones. The one you take for the real you is simply the one you’ve practiced the most.
“That’s just how I am”: said by whom?
Try hearing it in someone else’s mouth. A friend says exactly that to you, word for word, on exactly that subject. What do you answer? Most people are infinitely more lucid about others than about themselves. It’s a matter of distance. With your nose a foot from something, you can’t see its shape.
“That’s just how I am”: since when?
Put a date on it. A precise moment, a situation. Many people can’t, and that blank is the information. Those who can often discover a scene thirty years old, a word spoken by someone who wasn’t particularly well placed to say it.
None of these three questions asks you to change anything. They just set the line back in motion.
That said, I’m not asking anyone to stop saying “that’s just how I am.” The line is sometimes the truest thing you’ve said all year, and there’s a form of dignity in refusing to contort yourself to fit someone else’s mold. What interests me is that it stops the conversation. With others, and above all with yourself.
You can perfectly well keep the line and reopen what’s behind it. Saying that’s just how I am is not the same thing as knowing it.
That's exactly what my work is: not telling you who you should be, I have no idea, and no one can know it for you, just shifting the angle until the thing can be looked at in a different light. Often, what was stuck wasn't the problem; it was the place you were standing when you looked at it. Thirty minutes, free, no strings attached.