Persona

The TRUTH: It may not lead you to where you thought you were going, but it will always lead you somewhere better. When ignored, it will eventually show itself. The closeness of your relationships is directly proportional to the degree to which you have revealed the truth about yourself. It can be painful. ~Unknown

Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth. ~ Katherine Mansfield

The high-minded man must care more for the truth than for what people think. ~ Aristotle

Last week I wrote about the mask that we sometimes wear. The Persona is used in social encounters and characterizes the version of yourself displayed to others. When we want to create an impression we interact differently therefore the persona exhibits what we wish to be rather than who we really are. The word an Italian word derived from the Latin per sonare which means to sound through, basically it is the mask that we display to others. Carl Jung believed that humans have two perceiving functions (sensation and intuition) and two judging functions (thinking and feeling). These functions characterize our psychological type which controls our conscious behaviors. The part of yourself that we do not wish to display sometimes dominates our unconscious behavior and is displayed in failed relationships, addictions, phobias and sometimes through mental disorders.


All of this ties into an article (Being Honest With Yourself) that I was reading today on Oprah.com. The author suggests that we go through our lives hiding our true selves just to fit in. We suppress our true self and loose authencity in the process. Of course we all want to fit in and be liked but if you’re truly honest with yourself, HOW can anyone truly like us if they don’t know the person we are? Is that an authentic and fulfilling relationship? How can we be ourselves and still be liked?  When we project a false self to the world we become bored with relationships and try to keep our true selves hid by running away from those we love and who love us.


I do have things in my past that I am not particularly proud of but I do not try to mask and hide but I have tried to learn and grow from those experiences. I think that over the years I have learned that trying to be someone that I am not is just too much work. I have learned to like me and I hope that those who profess their love for me understand that what you see is what you get. I lived too many years trying to be someone I was not and trying to hide the mistakes I made but now I have come to terms with those actions and they no longer plague me. I think that confessing those things to myself and forgiving myself was a big part of the process. I am not proud of my mistakes but I am also not too proud to share them with others either. I hope that someone can learn something from the things that I’ve done and not make the same blunders in their own lives.


I have by NO means arrived at perfection but I think that I have learned to trust my intuition (more) and follow my heart. Before making a final decision these days I do a lot of thinking and weighing the options before reaching a conclusion. Of course sometimes the decisions are based off of things that others say and/or do, both of which can be unpredictable. Our lives are not a series of predictable events but a sequence of things that are sometimes out of our control. We have to learn to trust what our gut tells us and learn to live with the consequences. You can’t beat yourself up for mistakes but use them as a springboard to a good decision the next time. Share imperfections because those are what make us all unique. Personally, I want to know authentic people who are not afraid of their scars…..because it’s those scars that made them who they are.