What makes some people change their lives entirely, and how can we best become our true selves?

Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending.

In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.

What rational cogs are turning for people when they change their minds about who they are?

The show Alex appeared on, Faking It, had a simple set-up: each week a participant with an archetypical identity would be tasked with learning a skill that jarred with that identity. The participant had four weeks to perfect that skill before being sent to a real event where they would have to pass undetected by experts asked to spot the imposter.

Elbow-patched Alex arrived on the programme as the toffee-nosed eldest son of an upper-class British family. He was 20 years old and as Oxbridge as it’s possible to imagine. If you took Bertrand Russell, bound him in leather and made him smoke a cigar made entirely of armchairs you’d still be several punt rides short. We meet him for the first time at his family’s country home, where he shows us around the grounds and introduces us to Roger, who is a horse.

Alex’s task on Faking It was to pass as a bouncer at one of London’s busiest nightclubs in the middle of Euro 2000. He is 5ft 6in and slight, with a body that kept a respectful distance from any image of athleticism. His clipped private-school consonants and eager-to-please eyes are obvious artefacts of a life spent very far from rowdy pubs. Alex is not deterred; he packs his clothes, says goodbye to his boyfriend Clinton, bids adieu to Roger, and sets out to fake it.

To help him act the part, he is provided with three advisers – kickboxing champion Tony, former police officer and security expert Charlie and voice coach William – and sent to live for a month with Tony on the 15th floor of a council block. Alex has never been to London before and as his taxi drives towards Tony’s flat, he stares out the window with his eyes and mouth open. “My God, look at this place. Laundrette – oh my God, there’s a – I don’t think I’ve ever seen a laundrette… There’s a mattress! There is a mattress, on the pavement… I’m going to get beaten, the absolute shit out of me, in this tie. And this jacket. Oh. My. God.”

How do you change your mind about who you really are? Presumably you start with a view about what your “true” self is and then go on to repudiate that view. But even that first step turns out to be remarkably difficult, because you have to work out what a “true” self could be. When Alex arrived on Faking It he thought he knew what his sense of “me-ness” looked like. It was marching him towards a future life in a big country house, going to horse trials, hunting and shooting. But as you’ve probably guessed, that isn’t how it worked out. Something about Faking It changed Alex’s mind about what his “true” self was really like.

How is that possible? What rational cogs are turning for people when they change their minds about who they are? Are beliefs about ourselves even the kind of thing we can be rational about, when we’re the ones who make those beliefs true? I had to ask Alex directly.

I found him in Australia, where he now lives. It’s been nearly 20 years since the programme first broadcast. His vowels have been hammered flat by years in Australia and he is not as affably eager to please. In some way I think I’d expected to know him, having seen him on TV, but when he says he’s changed he isn’t lying.

“Did going on the show really change your understanding of who you were?” I ask.

Four or five weeks after I got back home to Oxford I left the UK and came to Australia. I literally dropped everything

“Yes. Completely,” says Alex. ‘“After the show – or, after that experience, I don’t really look at it as a show any more – four or five weeks after I got back home to Oxford I left the UK and came to Australia. I literally dropped everything. I arrived in Australia with a backpack and not much else.”

Before that moment, Alex’s life had followed a predictable pattern. “And then the show was this sort of great chasm that broke that in my mind, and I went, ‘Hang on! I don’t have to do all those things any more. I don’t have to be someone’s son, or brother, or grandson, I can actually be… me.’ I wasn’t going on any mission of self-finding, because I didn’t realise I was lost.”

What is going on in this kind of mind-change? Is our sense of who we are a belief just like any other? More pressingly, how do we do it? Is it the kind of thing we can be persuaded into? What does it mean to have a belief about your true self? What even is a true self? It’s no good trying to change your own mind – or, worse, someone else’s – about something you can’t even begin to describe.

One possibility involves understanding the “self” as the centre of an autobiographical story – a kind of internal narrator. But how would we debunk the autobiography we have been mentally narrating and replace it with a more accurate one?

Here we hit the first problem: unlike any other story, our internal narration about what kind of person we are can become our reason for acting in a particular way. Then we act in that particular way and create more supporting evidence for the story about being that particular way. The story forms a self-justifying loop turning ever around on itself like an evidentiary Möbius strip.

Alex, from where he sits now, is especially well-positioned to see how internal narrators can tamper with the evidence. “I was doing what I should have done and I loved what I should have done, because I should have done it, and then I did it, so I thought I should do it some more.”

Occasionally Faking It had a contestant who spent the whole month in foot-shuffling self-consciousness. One episode tasked a prim lawyer with becoming a garage MC and he never got over how unlike him it was to rap.

Alex wasn’t like that. Things got very real when he went for his first kickboxing lesson. All Tony’s male fighters were so much bigger than Alex that Tony’s girlfriend, Berenice, climbs in the ring with him. When she literally shoved him off the mat he made no effort to hide the fact that he is curled up and wheezing. He was not trying to be anything other than what he was: a young man who’d been hit in the face and who needed to get a lot better, quickly.

So he had his head shaved. He started walking with more bounce in his knees. He stayed in character around the clock and filmed his video diaries in an east London accent.

“Why did you commit so much?” I ask him, trying to find something that might explain his change of mind. Maybe he was secretly trying to shed his old identity all along.

“No, I had never had any of those existential thoughts whatsoever. It just sort of happened.” One big help was that somewhere along the way, Tony, Charlie and William changed their minds about Alex. Something about his commitment seemed to win them over, and they accepted him on to that plane of UK male friendship of laugh- shoving each other in the shoulder.

One night they took Alex to a strip club. He did his best not to shrink from the debauchery, but afterwards he looked like a concussed cartoon character, birds circling around his head.

“What about your first exposure to the exposure… of naked ladies, exposing themselves?” asked Tony.

“It was interesting,” Alex replied. “Because, um, I’m gay.” Alex is the only person who seems to view this as any sort of big deal.

“You had your prejudice about us,” Charlie nodded.

“Yeah. To be quite honest, I did,” Alex said.

It’s a moment of genuine tenderness in a show about faking, but what nobody remarked on was that Alex’s East End accent hadn’t slipped the whole time.

If changing your mind about who you really are means getting your internal narrator to tell a story that matches the facts better, presumably we need to find the evidence that will let us access that new story. The problem here is that the only tool we have for doing this investigation is the very thing that stands to be imperilled by the results of that investigation: the so-called “narrator” at the centre of our lives.

Who does the displacing? Is our “true” self somehow able to narrate itself into existing? On top of this existential magic, we’d need a way to work out which of the available evidence really matters, and which way it plays. We need to distinguish between the actions and thoughts and habits that reveal something deeply true about ourselves, and those that we can dismiss as the old internal narrative. Sometimes the old story is just the exact opposite of the new story. But as a general principle there’s no guarantee that things will work like this. Evidence against something is not evidence for something else, and falsifying one story doesn’t always make another truthful.

There is a very real possibility that the moments that force us to erase our internal narratives will do just that – erase the narrative – and then call it a day. And if having an internal narrative is so important to having a “self”, what’s left when the narrative crumbles? What are we in the space between stories?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fake it till you make it: or else stop faking it and become someone different. Illustration: Michelle Thompson

The night of Alex’s final test arrived. He was to man the door at the Hippodrome, a vast nightclub in London that holds 2,000 people inside a space that was once used for circuses. Crowds of drunken football fans were riotous and slurring, struggling to keep both eyelids raised while insisting they needed to be let in. Alex’s mentors watched him on a feed in the manager’s office. They were laughing but plainly nervous. Four experienced doormen were Alex’s “competitors”. Each of them, including Alex, took a turn manning the door, and then the Hippodrome’s real-life security team was told that one was an imposter.

None of them caught him. His mentors roared with joy. “It’s like seeing your kid walk and talk for the first time, innit!” said Tony, genuinely chuffed. It was such a resounding triumph for such an unlikely underdog. Then Alex packed his things and told the camera it had all been marvellous. But as Alex sat on the train back to his country house, it was no longer clear that he had been playing. His whole manner was different from that of the person he had been when he last saw his family. In the post-game wrap-up on the show, drama coach William said something prescient: “I think he stopped acting about a week ago.”

Almost as soon as Alex got home, he realised his old life wasn’t going to stick. He boarded a plane to Alice Springs, where the sand is an electric orange and the running water often doesn’t. “I went to work almost straightaway at the Aids Council of Central Australia. I helped run a needle exchange programme. That was purely on the strength of what I’d learned in the show, because I could handle myself. I was so much more confident of myself and my abilities in that world.”

A couple of nights a week, he worked as a doorman in a pub. He moved free of backstory. He wasn’t anyone’s son, or anyone’s friend from a fancy school, or anyone’s anything. “I was more able to be me. I was just able to be… more… I was going to say ‘more normal’, but it’s not more normal, it’s just more.” He’s stayed in Australia for the past two decades, letting life go about what he calls its “organic progression”.

This is what’s so striking about Alex’s mind-change. The moment he decided he had been wrong about who he was – the moment he let go of his old life in England – doesn’t seem to have been characterised by seeing the evidence of a new internal story so much as simply not telling the old one. He did not deliberate himself into a new sense of self by starting at first principles or being persuaded that in fact the “real” Alex had a certain set of traits. He just stopped believing, and waited to see what would happen. He stayed with Clinton. He moved to Sydney, then Melbourne. He got a suit-and-tie job. For a while he didn’t speak much to his family, but now visits them.

“Once a year I go back and just become what I was.” It is his life, not anyone else’s. In the end, I think Alex’s experience shows us just how strange it is to think of changing our minds about ourselves as a rational process.

I now think my question about whether we can be persuaded into the “right” belief about our “true selves” rests on the false idea that there is some truth waiting to be discovered. And that we can get at it with enough evidence, as though the Alex of today was waiting, dormant, inside the Alex of 2000, and that the right sort of evidence could have revealed him. Of course it wasn’t.

The traits and preferences and perspectives Alex now takes to define himself didn’t exist to be discovered when he was wondering who he really was; they were made in and by the decision to walk away. Perhaps the challenge in changing our minds about who we really are is not to rationally persuade ourselves into a new story about who we are, but to learn to live for periods of our life without one.

This sounds like a deeply frightening prospect, if you think that selves just are – or depend upon – a coherent narrative. But life without pre-written story can also be enormously fun. That’s part of what was so great about the episodes of Faking It that ended as successfully as Alex’s: you got to watch the childish wonder of people realising they were capable of the things they had declared they could never do. It was hard not to well up when people broke through their rigid views of themselves to find joy and promise in the possibility of life without a script.

When I spoke to Alex last, he and Clinton were coming up to their 19th anniversary, which means that this is the year where they have spent more than half their lives together. Berenice, the girl who monstered Alex in his first kickboxing lesson, married Tony, Alex’s mentor.

Alex was their best man.

Extracted from Stop Being Reasonable by Eleanor Gordon-Smith (Scribe, £14.99), published on 11 July. Buy it from guardianbookshop.com for £13.19