Meet perpetual new kid on the block, Toni Myers.

As a child Toni moved every two years. Each time as she faced a new transition she asked herself,  “What new thing about me will I learn when I make this move?”  Each time she explored a new aspect of who she was, and became a fuller version of herself.

Toni is the personification of the Theory of Possible Selves, which says we put on and take off aspects and identities all the time and we keep what fits and discard what doesn’t. We decide what works based on feedback from the people around us. But when you move all the time, that chorus is constantly changing. How do you build a community that can give you feedback meaningful enough to influence who you are?

For Toni, the answer was found on the Internet, in her connections and friends in the non-physical space of Facebook. Her friends were there for her and when she found herself faced with a crisis, it turned out her resilience lay in the community she had built into her virtual home base, rather than in any geophysical home base.

Listen to Toni’s story in the latest episode of The Resilient:

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Toni Myers is the Interim Director of the Multicultural Resource Center, Assistant Dean of Students, and a recently appointed First-Year Class Dean at Oberlin College and Conservatory, Oberlin, OH. Visit the Oberlin College website for more about Toni.

The Resilient is a podcast about powerful people, like you and me. It’s an eavesdrop session on their toughest times, and what they’ve done since then. It’s about life transitions, difficult decisions and unexpected twists and turns. Because life happens. It’s brought to you by FlowerApp.com and is produced and presented by Dr Aleks Krotoski and Pillowfort Productions. It is mixed by Katie McMurran.