impossiblity of personalities...

have been having generous doses of introspection the past few weeks!

whenever we go through a challenging circumstance and we have to make choices, I presume it is natural for people to score deeper into themselves and try and find the core personality we are. emotional, weak, rational, strong, non-believer, gullible, spontaneous, self-righteous, conformist, rebellious...

and then we want to make a choice based on our conclusion as applied to the present situation. to do this we try to predict what would happen when we make either choice. then we decide if this will make us feel good or not. will it make the other stakeholders in the situation feel good or not. and then how much do we care for the effect on the other stakeholders and how much for our own...all driven by logic and an assumption about the predictability of our nature!

and how do we determine this predictable core personality of ours? we have no choice but to go back to our experiences and incidents from our past. they help us define our personality to us. we try to make a judgement about ourselves and hence determine what we should do.

am beginning to really wonder if this is correct. our instincts are over time layered and cemented by experiences, emotions, ideas, beliefs and we go through this continuous process of what we think is change. but i think this is not change, i think this might just be the insulation of our instincts and hence a blurring and over time possibly disappearance of our core image.

but even here, there is this assumption that there was a core unique personality that was ours in the first place. and then there is this debate on whether there is such a thing as an innate personality unique to each individual.

i have gone through numerous phases of a changing external personality. i have to talk to different close friends and each of them exposes a different aspect of my perceived personality. it has been heartening to see the consistency in most of these perceptions of different people (who don't even know each other, so their individual opinions would not have influenced each others'). this consistency strengthens the belief that there is a certain 'me' that they know and hence i do too!! but then there are inconsistencies too, and some real glaring ones. so do we choose to ignore those? most likely we do...we are sure we have a 'real, unshakeable, personality' of our own and it is quite scary to think otherwise, so we just rationalize these inconsistencies and move on...

i am beginning to believe that this self-image is defined only by our interactions with others, hence their reactions to us and over time this fortifies itself. over time this becomes habit and we keep behaving this way with new people and their reactions, if favourable, strengthen this behaviour...if it creates conflict we usually are repelled, and so we go into this zone of comfort and interact more with people who react favourably...

i think we are all agnostics! we just take stances based on earlier stances that made a relatively less delible mark on our lives and our behaviours...and of course if something is immensely favourable or drastically unfavourable at a given point in time, we are either tempted or we acquiesce...and we might take a stance contrary to our "defined" personality...but just that once...not to say that we change...next time something similar happens it is equally likely that we may take either stance...

so if there is a really challenging circumstance what do we do? succumb to habit of "personality"...or succumb to temptation of comfort or that of our egos...suffering through it and trying to identify our instinctive behaviour is too long a haul...and too bloody painful!