When are we ever free, to be me? When are we ever free to be the person, we fully are? Did you spend yesterday, totally being yourself? You never changed what you wanted to say, to accommodate someone's feelings? Or to fit in, with those around you? Or to "Keep The Peace"? Or... a million other reasons. Can you even remember a day when you did not change something about yourself, for one reason or another? When we stop and think about it, we do a lot of changing of ourselves... Well, of how we are perceived by others.
There's the rub. We only allow certain people to perceive us, as we feel they want to perceive us. For whatever reason, our relationship with them, is more important to us, than our relationship with ourselves. And this brings us to the sometimes nasty sounding matter of different personas.
Persona...(in the psychology of C. G. Jung) the mask or façade presented to satisfy the demands of the situation or the environment and not representing the inner personality of the individual; the public personality (contrasted with anima)
Hmmm, does that sound sort of nasty? For a long time, what that word {'persona'} brought to my mind was 'Sybil'. Or 'Three Faces of Eve'. Multiple Personality Disorder. And I shied away from its use. Even though I could see 'persona' as not having to mean Multiple Personality Disorder. But I bowed to society and kept my version of it, to myself.
My version of it? What all of us do everyday. We hide part of who we are, for some reason or other. And we have no concern about so doing. Probably, because we don't stop to notice. Lots of people probably pride themselves on always being just who they are. Or at least, always attempting to be the 'perfect person' they feel they are called to be.
They'd be upset if someone said that lots of people have different sides to who they are. That they hide certain sides, from certain people. Show certain sides, to certain people. And easily keep everything straight. Even when there is no person, to/with whom, they can simply and totally be themselves. And this is fine with them. :-)
But once in a while, the strain begins to show.... It's gets so 'old' to keep putting one 'persona' out here, and another 'persona' out there. On and on and on... Tiring. It gets tiring. And some of the facade cracks. A bit... Here and there...
Sometimes when this happens, there is panic. And wild scrambling to fix the crack and not let it grow or linger. And sometimes, the panic seems silly. Is it really worth all the effort? What if some don't like some aspects of one's self? Is this the end of the world? Does it make that much difference, in the big scheme of things? Will it matter a twit, in 10 years? Or in 1 year? Or tomorrow even?
And sometimes, the answer is "No, it will not." :-)
And those moments are gloriously freeing.
There has always been a high, from throwing caution to the winds.
Get some old juices flowing, again.
Puts some much needed excitement back, into our usually dull existence.
>,-)
