I think my life is a pretty good demonstration that, given the proper motivation and support and effort, people really can change who and what they are at a fundamental and critical level. My life before I got sober is so wildly different from my life afterward that it sometimes feels like it happened to someone else. Sometimes my former self -- what I used to think and feel and say and do -- seems almost unrecognizable to me.
But not always.
There's an old saying that says "You can take the boy out of New York, but you can’t take New York out of the boy." And in recovery circles we talk about always being in recovery, about having our "grosser handicaps" removed but never being fully cured, about the need for constant vigilance since our disease is patient and always looking for new ways to come out.
In other words, I think that no matter how much we change, we can never fully escape who and what we were as young people, that the influence of our hometowns and the people in them -- and the choices we made as earlier versions of ourselves -- are so profound that they can never be completely removed, erased, or countered -- that I will always be that "Dumbass Punk from Home."
P.S. Props to Moby — We are all made of stars.