Even as a teenager, it occurred to her that her outward personality, the way other people saw her, was not something that was predetermined or fixed. She would experiment using different personalities, like trying on different masks, with different people and found that “personality” itself was just certain ways of acting that become an overall habit.
And then, through unexamined repetition, people forget that what had started as an improvised act in order to be liked, or to get attention, eventually became habitual. Before we know it, we are always “acting” like a particular kind of person all the time – the I-person others have come to expect.
She felt free just to know that she was not locked into a particular way of expressing herself, an I-personality like the ones so many kids all through school were trying to make up. She had gone to many different schools because her parents moved a lot.
In each school there were named personalities that she could identify: the popular girl, the bully, the smart kid, the dreamer, the cheerleader, the jock, the rebel. What was so funny was that all of their personality traits and affects were so predictable. There was a particular way of walking and gesturing when you were playing the part of “me.” Often the characters from television programs and from movies would be imitated, acted out, and become part of kids’ personalities.
She had grown up without television. This no doubt helped her to get an unconditioned perspective on the copy-cat personalities around her. Sometimes she felt that kids and grown-ups were just acting out the characters they saw on T.V. Being free from having a fixed personality, she was more unpredictable than them. Because she could not be pigeon-holed into any category, a lot of people felt uncomfortable being around her – they didn’t know how to act!
At times she was still and quiet, at other times she would “act the clown.” She did not act out the reactions that others expected because her “I” was free from having to have a fixed personality – her “me” could just be, spontaneously. She discovered that she could be any and all personalities.
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