Dropping the Act: Ditching Our Personas
The sense of fear and of dread – it’s familiar isn’t it? You’re in a social scenario and you’re running out of energy keeping up pretenses, maintaining the persona you put out into the world. It’s as though you’re mind, body and spirit simply can’t do it anymore. Chances are… they can’t.
When we put a persona out into the world, we are creating a whole new version of ourselves that is different and far removed from our authentic selves. The persona is created over years as we internalize feedback from others about who we are and who we should be. There is little rhyme or reason to it. Yes you may have feedback from your parents about social norms or general manners. But go deeper than that. Try to remember all the times you were told to be someone different, to act a different way or speak a different way in order for you to fit in more.
This unfortunate practice happens to all of us, it’s part of the growing up stages of life but there never seems to be an end to it because fear prohibits us from recognizing that who we were was always enough and that we never needed to change in the first place.
Fear is what fills the gap between who you are and who you put out into the world. It’s the feeling that pops up when we say, “I don’t know who I want to be” because “I don’t know who I am.” When we don’t know who we are right now, we panic. I can feel the anxiety as it flows through my body recalling years of having that exact sensation. I didn’t know who I was and so I figured I could create a person to become. It had to be easier that way. Right? Create a new version of myself and continue working towards that. I failed to take into consideration that designing a future without first taking stock of what I had is like trying to build a boat without instructions. You stumble through the tasks and to dos never quite feeling sure that at the end it’s all going to work out and you never quite trust that your boat will float.
To build a life from the foundation of uncertainty perpetuates the notion that we will never figure it out. We will never had the luxury of knowing ourselves so fully that one day, someone will actually never be able to tell us who we are or who they want us to be. We will have eliminated that interaction from our lives because we will such a firm grasp on who we are, that our foundation will be unshakable. When we are unshakable, our decisions, our choices, and the way we carry ourselves through life become entirely of our own making. We gain a sense of responsibility and accountability for how we move through the world and life becomes exciting because we are utilizing every single piece of ourselves, the pieces that we once put away in order to embrace the vastness one lifetime has to offer.
In order to get to an unshakable stance, we have to recognize where we are thrown off our game. Rubik’s cubing, a term I use to describe the act of shifting who we are constantly in order to fit a social situation, is one of the main ways we can begin to recognize the dissonance between who we are and who we put out into the world. When we Rubik’s cube, our souls interpret that the best pieces of us may not be what others what to receive. Instead, we learn how to adjust the dials of our traits in order to adapt to who we are with and where we are. We learn how to be hyper-vigilant of others cues and signals as a means of protecting ourselves. We become so afraid that others will see our true selves that we throw all of our effort behind keeping up the persona and mask.
At the end of the day, the fear we accumulate is what continues to motivate us to never embrace who we really are. In order to conquer the fear, we have to once again get curious about who we are and what we do. The only way to determine how we approach fear is to learn how to read our protective and defensive signals. The personas we wield are a combination of both defensive and protective mechanisms. How we display both mechanisms deeply impacts the way we dismantle the personas that we have so carefully curated over time. As we take time to breakdown our mechanisms, we can continue to hold space for the acceptance of why we held them in the first place and the role they served in our lives.
Begin by paying attention to when you start to put on a persona. Is it around people you feel intimidated by? Or around your crush? If you begin to notice where your persona clicks on, you suddenly have a wealth of information to pull from in terms of understanding how to shut it off. Personas begin to form when we are triggered and once you recognize your triggers you can systematically dismantle your response. The responses we carry to triggers may have been developed long ago in childhood and we may not have taken the time to change our approach. When we begin to recognize our triggers in Rubik’s cubing, this is a phenomenal opportunity to work on changing the habitualized response and replace it with something that works and feels better in the long run.
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