Ah, the ever dreaded question. But what if we’re looking at it wrong?
“Character, then, isn’t what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn’t a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. I have a lot of fun at dinner parties. As a result, I throw a lot of dinner parties and my friends see me there and think that I’m fun. But if I couldn’t have lots dinner parties, if my friends instead tended to see me in lots of different situations over which I had little or no control--like, say, faced with four hostile youths in a filthy, broken-down subway--they probably wouldn’t think of me as fun anymore.” -The Tipping Point This quote changed my perspective on both myself and how I want to portray my characters in my writing. (I was reminded of this quote by Avis, my character in The Lower Road, because the way she acts isn’t who she is--at least, it’s not the sum of her character. But I’ll write more about that later.) If you think about yourself in this way, there is no ‘real you’. You are you, always. You are you when you pretend to smile when you’re sad, just like you’re you when you’re at school or with the people you trust and care about most in the world. If something seems off about your behavior (or ‘you’re not acting like yourself’), it’s because there’s something more to the situation that’s influencing you but that others can’t perceive. But then… who are you? If you’re anything like me, you act and feel very different in different situations--almost unrecognizably, at times. For example, I’m very quiet around people I don’t know. (Social awkwardness tends to do that.) But around my family, I’m a chatterbox--to the point where my mom calls me ‘Light, Life, and Energy’. Is one of these ‘me’s really more real than the other? Sure, in one of these situations I’m more comfortable, but that doesn’t make the other any less real. “When we observe a woman who seems hostile and fiercely independent some of the time but passive, dependent and feminine on other occasions, our reducing valve usually makes us choose between the two syndromes. We decide that one pattern is in the service of another, or that both are in the service of a third motive. She must be a really castrating lady with a facade of passivity--or perhaps she is a warm, passive-dependent woman with a surface defense of aggressiveness. But perhaps nature is bigger than our concepts and it is possible for the lady to be hostile, fiercely independent, passive, dependent, feminine, aggressive, warm, castrating person all-in-one. Of course which of these she is at any particular moment would not be random or capricious--it would depend on who she is with, when, how, and much, much more. But each of these aspects of her self may be a quite genuine and real aspect of her total being.” -The Tipping Point (There’s actually an entire section of The Tipping Point dedicated to the power of context--it’s really interesting! And it goes into a lot more depth than I’m going into now.) To sum up: everyone’s a mess of contradictions (surprise!) and every aspect of them is real but dependent on the circumstances they find themselves in. Still with me? Coolio. Aaaaand we’re back to the big question again. Who am I? Hold on. I’m getting there. We (and by ‘we’ I mean people a lot smarter than me) still don’t know how much of an effect our genes have on our personalities. ‘Nature vs. Nurture’ and all that. But I’m going to make an assumption that what happens to us does impact our personalities and the choices we make in the future, and that genes play an important but ambiguous role in all that. So. Who are you? You are a combination of your genes and past experiences. This was a pretty uncomfortable discovery, at least for me. I’d like to think that I have a soul, that there’s something in me that will last beyond my death in some way, that existed before I was born, that will always exist, that is me without a doubt. But I don’t want to believe something because it’s comfortable. I want to believe something because I’ve thought about it and, as far as I can tell, it’s true (or at least close.) So I’d come to something that was sound logically, but that I was struggling to accept emotionally. After all, people will forget my name, no matter what I do with my life. They’ll forget the things I did. The places I love and call home will become unrecognizable. If all that is going to happen, and I don’t have a soul, what’s the point of anything? The rationalization that I came to was this: If I’m made up of my past experiences, then so is everyone else. I’m made up of everything I’ve ever done and everyone I’ve ever met, and I’ve had an impact on everyone I’ve ever interacted with. The people I’ve impacted will impact other people--people I’ve never met, who I’ll never meet. And so on and so on, like a giant ripple effect. Yes, the impact I’ve made will be diluted over time. But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t important. “My life amounts to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean. Yet what is any ocean, but a multitude of drops?” -Cloud Atlas That still leaves the matter of having a soul. If I don’t have a soul, then… what am I? As Garnet said to Stevonnie in Steven Universe: "You are an experience. Make sure that you're a good experience. Now GO. HAVE. FUN." I can’t speak for you, but I’m okay with being an experience. I’m not entirely comfortable, but I’m okay with it. Whew! That was long. Kudos to you if you stuck with me all the way to the end! What are your thoughts about this? Did everything make sense? If you have questions or disagree with anything I said, I’d love to hear your opinion! -Atlas
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This blog is probably not the top choice of websites, but even though it might not cure someone else's boredom, it sure cured ours. It doesn't matter if the reader of this paragraph clicks away within a few sentences of reading this, becuase as I write this, I don't stop. You'd think, 'what's the point of sharing if no one will stare at it for hours on end?', but for us, the point of sharing is to just, have it out there. The contributors, us, we could be the ones who look back on our words, and be some of the few who don't look away because the paragraph is long or doesn't really pertain to us. Because no matter what, it's out there. So why not take the chance to read what the author writes? Because before it was posted, they were the ones who thought, 'why not write it?'
--DeLarge Have you ever heard a word in a different language that just spoke to you? A word with no English counterpart, a word that you couldn't even begin to capture just right? You felt it when you heard it, and when you learned a translation it just didn't satisfy you? For me, that word is yugen. It is Japanese for an awareness of the universe, when you have a profound connection to everything. But it's so much more! It's nothing and yet everything, it's light and dark, it's hello and goodbye, it's happiness and sadness. It's the crashing of waves on a sandy beach and the twinkle of stars sprinkled across a purple-blue sky, but it's also the feeling of lonliness you get when the looking at an abandoned house and the musty smell of rain after a thunderstorm.
- Halcyon |
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