Something to Think About

I've had a number of conversations this week in which the subject has come up of how intensely people are themselves, sometimes--how on occasion, for an infinite number of reasons, people become almost caricatures, or heightened versions, of themselves.

I see this in action all the time, in people I know well, and others I don't know so well, and sometimes even in myself. It's always a little disconcerting, to witness the boiled-down essence of someone. It can be entertaining or frightening. Like an intensely reduced sauce, it can be exquisite or overbearing; it can be intolerable. But I have to admit, it is more interesting, revelatory, to see people in this state than it is to see them at an even keel, in the middle ground.

It also makes me think of this tendency of mine to forget that I am going to do whatever I do, and say whatever I say, and be whoever I am, as me--that as a parent, a friend, a daughter, a spouse, a teacher, a writer, I am still me first of all and more than anything else, and that I will parent as me, be a friend as me, and on and on ad infinitum. This is both obvious and reassuring. It is also hard to grasp and terrifying. I often want to separate or isolate parts of myself in these different roles in different contexts, and I can't.

It strikes me that the best thing to do, the only hope of reconciling myself with this idea of the pervasiveness of personality is to embrace it, and to work with it instead of fighting it, which I do too often in my work. It's not that I write in a voice that isn't mine--actually, I have a very hard time doing that. It's that I have too hard a time shutting out the notion of what I should be doing, and for whom, and why, when I know on some level what I should be doing is writing as me, about what I need to write about, regardless of anything or anyone else.

So my pledge tonight: to accept that my personality reduced to its essence is not everyone's cup of tea, and to be okay with that, and to write from it, when it is right to do so, and to learn what I can from the essences of everyone else. We shall see...