Unleash Your Inner Chameleon
I wrote this post on September 22, 2021
We’re all chameleons, but most of us don’t realize it. Bilinguals know it; so do most people that live with an alter ego, a pseudonym or a stage name.
What is this inner chameleon? It’s simply that potential we all have to express ourselves with a large variety of permutations, just as a chameleon can alter its appearance depending on mood. Many of the most accomplished artists, entrepreneurs and scientists are people that have the audacity to periodically experiment with something new and different.
We cheat ourselves and the world loses out when our inner chameleons are suppressed. Think of the inspiration Farrokh Bulsara has brought to millions of people through his alter ego, Freddy Mercury, and what a loss it would be if he had not found a way to unleash his inner performer.
But because it may be hard to relate to famous celebrities, I think it’s important to stress how there’s already a bit of chameleon in all of us, and it’s particularly evident in bilingual people.
My friend and colleague Hugo is a great example. He’s a bilingual French and Spanish speaker who uses English as his language of business and investment memos. In English he is a deeply skeptical credit analyst, perpetually taking a glass-half-empty view of how a transaction may perform. Colleagues in the office, especially those trying to get a deal approved, find him frustrating and boring; grudgingly admitting (with a curse) there might be some basis to his paranoias. But in our Spanish conversations, he is a non-stop stream of jokes. In Spanish, Mr. Can’t-Take-That-Risk talks to me about the joys of vacationing with his 3 young kids in Southern Yucatan, going from town to town eating street food. His face in Spanish comes alive with silly jovial features that are just nowhere to be found when he’s in English mode.
I became aware of my inner chameleon in my early 20s during a journey with my girlfriend to Peru and Bolivia. She had only known my English-speaking self and was finding it astonishing to suddenly hear me speaking a lot in Spanish, repeatedly telling me that I seemed like a different person.
But nearly 30 years on I’ve become a little frustrated, having this awareness of the chameleon potential and not exploiting it. Possessing two or three language modes is no better than one if you can’t muster the courage or organization to regularly get on a ‘stage’ to perform - whether that performance be publishing, launching business ventures, or a new community event.
Why is it so difficult to perform? Besides disorganization, I think it’s because we’re conditioned to conform and to be much more paranoid by the thought of individual failure than group failure. Society hates chameleons, but we all have chameleon potential. Culture is a psychopathic boss that demands loyalty over truth.
Why do I think it’s so important to constantly push ourselves onto a new stage? Simply because it may turn out to bring you joy, and isn’t the potential to improve joy always worth exploring?
I signed up for Write of Passage to force myself onto a stage that requires me to bring out a creative side of me that I know is badly malnourished, but necessary for my overall growth. Although I have a number of interests, I have no idea of where the mysterious river of writing will take me.
There’s one other thing I’ve come to realize is critical to unleashing my inner chameleon: community. Immersion in a community that embraces funkiness is key.
Whereas up until 20 years ago finding that community necessitated physical immersion in a particular place (probably a big city), today the internet is the much larger, much more accessible, and possibly safer place to congregate (and just as there are rules for how to survive in New York, there are rules for how to survive on Twitter).
I’ve come to realize that we each have an obligation to nurture our inner chameleon, and this happens when we force ourselves to be public creators and immerse ourselves in communities that encourage and embrace funkiness, because a little crazy can be deeply rewarding.