Sometime in my early twenties, I found myself explaining to someone why I couldn’t imagine doing something I really wanted to do. Not why I was afraid of him. Why I could not imagine. My version that would do that didn’t feel like it was available. It felt like trying to imagine a color you had never seen before.
This is not the same as fear.
I often say that fear has an object. You can name what you fear. You can examine it, argue with it, do breathing exercises on it. The thing I describe is rather empty. Not a wall you bump into, but a wind you just can’t see through.
The traditional story about being stuck says: people stay because they are afraid to leave. Fear of the unknown, fear of failure, fear of what others will think. And that’s true for certain people, certain situations. But that doesn’t explain what I keep coming across in my psychological research and conversations with people who outwardly seem to have every reason and opportunity to change, but don’t.
The problem is not always fear. Sometimes it is the case that one has lost the ability to imagine oneself as someone else. And that’s a bigger problem because you can’t run towards something you literally can’t imagine.
What does imagination have to do with identity
In 1986, psychologists Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius introduced a concept central to how people do or do not change. They were called “possible self”: cognitive representations of who we can become, who we hope to become, and who we will become.
The insight wasn’t just about people thinking about the future. It was that the imagination of a possible future self links current behavior to future outcomes. You don’t move towards a life you can’t mentally live in. The image must first exist.
Therefore, the potential song is not a decoration. These are infrastructures. The ability to imagine yourself as someone else, in a different role, relationship, or context, is what makes change psychologically available. When this capacity shrinks, change will be difficult not because external barriers have grown, but because the internal template has shrunk.
And the repertoire of possible vocals can be narrowed. Long periods of stress, limited environments, relationships that consistently reflect who you are can all quietly diminish the futures you can imagine. Not dramatically. Gradually. As the room becomes smaller if you don’t look out the window.
The familiar self and how it becomes a trap
Building on the work of Marcia Erik Erikson, James identified something he named exclusion of identity: a state in which a person has committed to an identity without seriously considering alternatives. Commitment is a real feeling. The stability feels real. But it was never tested against other options because those options were never taken seriously.
What makes exclusion interesting is not that it is obviously pathological. Often not. An excluded identity can feel solid, even comfortable, for years. This is organized around a clear awareness of who you are, what your role is, what your relationships mean. The problem, as Marcia noted, is that this kind of stability is fragile. It holds together as long as the surrounding world reinforces it. When something shifts, one can become defensive and strangely fragile because the self to be protected was never seriously examined in the first place.
But there is a version of this that is not about adolescent development or a dramatic identity crisis. It’s the quieter, more mundane version: the gradual calcification of the self that comes from spending too long in an environment that reflects only one version of who you are.
A relationship can do that. This can be a workplace, a city, a family role, a group of friends who have known you for so long that your identity is essentially fixed in their presence. The self that emerges in these contexts is real but also limited. And when enough of your life is organized around these connections, the other possible selves, the ones that might be just as real under other circumstances, fade away.
Why blame fear when imagination is the problem?
The reason we’re basically scared is because part of the explanation is that it’s a more convenient story. Fear means self-determination. If you are afraid, you can decide to face the fear, overcome it, take the leap. The self-help industry is almost entirely based on this logic. Determine what you are afraid of, gather your courage, change your life.
But this framing is useless when the actual problem is imaginative. You can’t encourage yourself towards a version you can’t imagine. The instruction “just do” assumes that there is a clear enough “this” for the goal. For many people who feel stuck, it doesn’t exist.
There is also a cultural preference for persevering in a role or relationship as virtue or cowardice. Or committed, loyal, persistent, long-term. Or you’re afraid of what it would cost to leave. Neither frame asks the more interesting question: does this person still have a clear sense of who they would be without it?
This question is phrased differently. And it often comes closer to the truth.
How the environment shrinks the imagination
The environment does not only constrain behavior. They limit cognition. They shape what they feel is possible, what seems worth imagining, what the self might be like.
I noticed this in my relationship with my own place. Some cities seem to contract a very familiar version and leave other parts unused. In other places, especially where no one knows me, they do something else. A version of me that had no role, no story to read, no accumulated expectations to live up to had to figure out what it really wanted. The repertoire opened up because nothing in the environment narrowed it down.
It’s not magic. It’s psychology. The possible song available at any given moment is partly shaped by the social mirrors around you. Who you are in a relationship is partly a function of how the relationship has taught you to see yourself. The fact that you work in a job is partly a function of how that job has developed your competencies. These mirrors are useful. But they can also limit you in ways that are very hard to see from the inside, precisely because they feel normal.
Researcher Hazel Markus has noted that potential songs arise from experience, social comparisons, and cultural models. What others are now, I could become. But the reverse is also true: if you’ve never seen a version of your own life that looks like what you really want, or if the people around you consistently reflect a narrower view of who you are, then your imagination has less material to work with.
What does this look like in relationships?
In relationships, this dynamic has specific characteristics. A long-term relationship has accumulated a common understanding of each person. This can be one of the deepest forms of familiarity. But it could also mean that the self you bring to the relationship has been quietly and gradually edited down to the right version.
Usually not with cruelty. Through acquaintance. The roles are arranged. An environment of expectations is formed. You know what you are to this person and they know what they are to you. The categories seem stable. Then at some point something changes and you realize that the person you were in that relationship isn’t quite who you are or who you want to be anymore. But the version of you who you would be is not available to any of you. He was never part of this story.
This is not the same as being afraid to leave. This is a more confusing problem. You don’t know who you would be on the other side because that person never had a chance to exist.
There is something about it that I recognize from both a research and a more personal perspective: the tension between a deep desire for closeness and a sense of closeness can sometimes demand that it be less than it is. It’s not exactly a relationship problem. This is an imaginary problem. The possible self, which is fully close and fully self, has not yet been constructed.
Three questions worth sitting down for
Research on possible singing and identity exclusion points to a different kind of introspection than most personal development frameworks encourage. Instead of asking what you’re afraid of or whether you’re committed enough, it’s asking something more structured. THE Ideapod frame offers a useful set of lenses for these types of examinations:
- Unlearning: What scenarios have you accepted about staying and leaving that treat it as a matter of courage rather than imagination? Marcia’s research on exclusion suggests that identities assumed without exploration can feel completely solid—until the moment they aren’t. The question is not whether you are brave enough to change. It’s about whether you’ve ever really looked at what you’ve ruled out.
- Renovation: Markus and Nurius found that potential songs are built from available material – what you see others become, what your environment reflects back to you. If the repertoire has narrowed, recovery is not a matter of motivation. It’s a matter of input. What contexts, relationships, or experiences are currently expanding your possible feelings, and what are contracting them?
- Protection: The subtler risk here is not a dramatic limitation. It’s accumulated familiarity—the way long-held roles and relationships can quietly edit the self down to the right version without anyone intending that outcome. Noticing how your current environment influences your sense of what’s possible isn’t unfaithful. This is the beginning of an honest inventory.
What really opens up the imagination
New environments help. Not because travel is magical, but because being in a place where there is no existing version of it opens up space for other versions to be imagined. Community mirrors are restored. There is no defined role. You have to find out again, without the familiar scaffolding, who you really are when no one knows anymore.
Relationships with people who don’t have a definite idea of you can do something similar. This is the case in any environment where you are really outside the established pattern, you are a beginner in something, you work in a different field and you spend time with people who live differently than you.
None of these are pure recipes. It’s more of a direction. The domain of imagination tends to expand when inputs change, when social mirrors are varied, when more life models, identities, and possibilities are in view.
Markus and Nurius found that possible songs are built from what is available: from what you have seen others become, from what your cultural context offers as possible, from feedback from your environment about who you are. Expanding the repertoire means deliberately expanding the inputs. Not because you mustered enough courage, but because you found new material for your imagination to work with.
A final reflection
People who stay in a life that no longer suits them are usually not cowards. These are often people who have lost access to a clear enough picture of another kind of existence that would make movement feel real rather than abstract.
It’s a more subtle and compassionate way of seeing, and I think it’s also more accurate.
Change requires more than just courage. You need a target that is imaginatively vivid enough to navigate. Courage comes after the image. And for many people, the picture has quietly narrowed until it’s gone.
What would it mean to take this seriously? Not to push harder, face your fears, or commit to growth, but to honestly ask: What version of myself could I no longer imagine? And where can I find material for rebuilding?
These are slower questions. Less motivating. But they tend to land closer to where the actual problem is.
