The natural born chameleon?

My friend recently told me, "I think it's funny that you are so impressionable, that you think of yourself as a void, because you are one of the strongest personalities I know. You are so distinctive and peculiar."

I could see what she meant. Everyone who knows me for longer than a few hours realizes that I am "quirky." I say all the right words and do all the right moves, but don't quite have the social fluency to seem completely normal. I can also be very lazy about maintaining a mask, particularly in low risk situations or with people who don't matter. Despite seeming distinctive and peculiar, however, I am still extremely impressionable.

Some of the psychologists that I have talked to via the blog have expressed surprise that I consider impressionability and the related weak-sense-of-self to be sociopathic traits. I don't know why they would be surprised. There must be some reason why we are so good at being chameleons, I always just assumed that it was instinctive, a symptom of who I am. Blending in has more or less been a reflex for me as long as I can remember, as it has been for most sociopaths I have known. For instance, this reader:

I moved a lot as a child. I knew how to adapt a fresh persona and ways to gain friends in an expedient fashion before I knew my long division. I also was obliged to lie, convincingly so, about who I was. For years I wasn't even allowed to use my own name and acknowledge where I was from.

When you speak of impressionability, that for me was sort of a survival tactic. America has many different cultural microcosms that vary so much, if they didn't speak English you'd guess it was a different country. I had to learn the local social norms and adapt to them quickly, and also their accents and local lexicon. Even more lizard-brain style mannerisms would be local, like specific body language gestures. In that case, I guess it isn't necessarily lizard-brain, but you understand.

I essentially spent years learning how to be other people. So much so, that I had no idea who I even was when I was allowed to be Me again. I still don't even know if I have a real Me. And it doesn't bug me, either, if anything, it entertains me.

I know for a fact that I did some very odd antisocial behavior, like practice emoting in front of a mirror, accents, etc. but when I was that age, I didn't realize that everyone came with their own emotional cheat-sheet, and I was the only one that had to study for the test.

When I read things like this or think back on my own early experiences, I wonder -- do we learn how to be chameleons? Is it learned behavior to subjugate who we "really are," perhaps as a survival tactic? And maybe after we've pretended for so many years we just forget who we used to be? Or are we born with our shapeshifting abilities? Maybe we're like liquids or gases, always taking on the shape of our environment. Because we do have some finite qualities, we just have no where near the rigidity of the typical empath.