When I was 20 I had some very fixed ideas about who I was. I could easily say "I'm a bad person", "I'm selfish", "I'm useless", "I'm confused" etc. and the list would go on and on. 20 years later I ask myself "Am I still bad?", "Am I still selfish?" "Am I still confused" and the answers aren't easy it's a sort of "yes, no, maybe, depends"
And I wonder when things changed, when did I go from being bad to being ok, how many years did it take to go from being very confused to slightly confused and how many more years must I wait before I finally understand things. It’s easy to see that there is no single point in time, I’m constantly changing.
The past defines us, shapes us, makes us who we are, our joy, our pain, the people we know, the people we've lost, it all changes us. But we can never say "This is when I changed", in another 20 years I will see myself as a completely different person to how I see myself today and will probably ask myself the same questions.
The point is that when you say things like "I'm a murderer" then that is how you see yourself at this moment in time, but that's all it is, who you are is not something that's fixed, you used to be a certain type of person and in the future you'll be a different type of person, the person who you are now is simply a stage in between the two. It is a state of becoming.
So I try not to think of the past, I don't like who I was. The present day me is ok I guess, but what’s really changed things for me is that I now look to the future me with real hope. In the same way it would be false of me to say things like “I think you’re a wonderful person” or “I care about you deeply”, the truth is I simply think you have a lot of potential which would be a shame to waste.