“Oh well that’s me”

I have been wondering lately about this thing we call “personality”. A term which we so often use to describe ourselves and other people. Charming, cool, hard working, clever, generous, powerful, lazy, are among many of the words we employ to explain how we see ourselves and others. But the word personality is also often used as a screen behind which we hide or defend the way we are. I have so often heard people say “Oh well that’s me,” when you ask why they’re angry or unpunctual or generally when they behave like boors. “That’s me.” Nice way to fob off further inquiry or to resist change of any sort, especially when accompanied by a particular tone of voice which puts a stop to any sort of investigation.

In a way it seems that one’s personality is indeed built around the natural essence of an individual and that it is what lends colour to our lives together: the fact that we are so different from each other and in a sense irreplaceable, although the difference is more like the form, the pattern or colour which is capable of turning the same lump of clay into so many different objects. But then, as much as one’s personality reflects one’s inner essence it is also a reaction to the environment, an accumulation of learned characteristics, often an outcome of our defences and our struggle against all that disturbs us about life.

So you have people who appear mean or cruel, or seem to be always in a rage, or come across as arrogant. They are often that way because the circumstances of their lives probably persuaded them early on in life that the only way to cope, or to survive as the case may be, was to develop characteristics which would help them “protect themselves” their personal identity being a major part of the “self”.

The trouble is we don’t realise, that what we project to others or what we see in each other are really surface characteristics and we start to identify ourselves and others with the labels which sum up these traits. Cool, hep, quick, smart, rebellious, crazy, dreamy. When it comes ourselves we take pride in the labels we apply to ourselves. When it comes to others however, we are likely to damn them so that cool becomes cold, hep becomes superficial, quick can be seen as cunning and so on. In either case, we pick out aspects of our own and other people’s personalities which we isolate and use to describe the whole person.

To use the concept of personality to freeze our self image and that of the others is to turn ourselves and each other into cardboard figures and deny ourselves access to the natural richness which accompanies a fluid personality. An idea, in this way, limits us and renders us incapable of the magical transformations which define life itself. If you are one of those who no longer knows how to define him/herself, who finds it difficult to say with any degree of firmness that you are “this” or “that” kind of person, I imagine you’ve made a start and are on the way to climbing out of the cardboard cut-out in which you’ve lived so far and on the way to becoming a real human being.