playing with precision

more notes on change

i’ve been thinking a lot lately about the properties of a personality. when i talk to people, i find myself noticing more and more, in everything they do, what they believe about themselves and the world around them. obviously, this is what we’ve been told to label as ‘a personality’, but my question is, how set in stone is that? this morning, i was sitting with my dad at the breakfast table, and in response to something, he went: “well, that’s just how i operate.” is it, though? or i guess, to be more specific, must it be?

from just generally being on the internet, you might have seen this quote floating around, lifted out of The Flinch by Julien Smith:

“You don’t know anyone at the party, so you don’t want to go. You don’t like cottage cheese, so you haven’t eaten it in years. This is your choice, of course, but don’t kid yourself: it’s also the flinch. Your personality is not set in stone. You may think a morning coffee is the most enjoyable thing in the world, but it’s really just a habit. Thirty days without it, and you would be fine. You think you have a soul mate, but in fact you could have had any number of spouses. You would have evolved differently, but been just as happy.
You can change what you want about yourself at any time. You see yourself as someone who can’t write or play an instrument, who gives in to temptation or makes bad decisions, but that’s really not you. It’s not ingrained. It’s not your personality. Your personality is something else, something deeper than just preferences, and these details on the surface, you can change anytime you like.”

i, for the most part, share this sentiment. in pointing out the automatic or gut-reaction to being faced with a certain situation, it argues that all these things we take for granted as being the parts of a personality (being shy, being dependent on caffeine, being someone who makes bad decisions) are not set in stone. instead, Smith implies, a personality is something more inherent than mere preference. those are just for decoration, they’re embellishments to something truer that you can palpably say exists.

this is where i hesitate a bit — while your preferences might not be your personality, per se, i think there’s a reason we’re inclined towards the things we are. like, for example, in our experiences with art. there was once i went to an art exhibit with a friend that i ended up absolutely adoring, and in the months after i read loads from the artist and found a lot of inspiration in his practice. my friend, on the other hand, was slightly mystified by my enthusiastic response and said she hadn’t resonated with it as much as i had. it wasn’t about weighing whether the art was “good” or “bad”, it was about what made it click extra for me when it didn’t quite work the same way for her. i don’t have the answer to it, but i think that gap is what we might ostensibly call a ‘personality’.

---

all of this is, i think, fairly obvious. where i start getting tangled up again - to continue a thread from 2022 (lol, iykyk) - is in asking what’s stable about the notion of ‘i’? what do i mean when i say ‘me’, if all of the parts that supposedly constitute ‘me’ can be switched out at any minute, ship of Theseus-style? or added to, so that the ‘i’ is always in excess of itself and never has to deal with anything that might contradict it. in 2022, my answer to that was to to refer to Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes and come up with some explanation about his ‘circle of fragments’, basically claiming that a personality is not a unified structure but les cercle des fragments with a question mark in the centre. going back to The Flinch, Barthes’ fragments are the embellishments, giving shape to the ??? at the centre. but then, that also assumes that there is 1. a shape that could plausibly be given/imposed and, 2. a resulting centre, meaning that at the end of all that philosophising there’s still the belief that your personality, inherent as it’s assumed to be, exists.

like with my previous writing on addiction, i’m also inclined to say that there’s a shape to a personality, like a container. the embellishments are what we fill it up with, but what we fill it up with takes the shape of the container without ever becoming indistinguishable from it, i.e, they still exist as parts not integrated into a whole. i don’t think it’s entirely inaccurate to say that most people - including me, for a very long time - assume that because the embellishments take the shape of the container, they somehow become the container. or that they’re so stuck in there there’s no point trying to take them out because they’re in the container anyway they like it there it’s so much easier to leave them as they are.

the next issue is, of course, that not all of the embellishments are favourable. for instance, for a while now, i’ve really disliked the relationship i have with alcohol, among other things. i’ve known since i was quite young that i have an addictive personality, and it’s a running joke with my friends that i need 3 addictions in rotation at any one time to sustain me; less is good, more is out of the question. but the way i behaved with alcohol (and the other addictions on my rotating list) never made me feel good about myself, and reinforced my habit — which is obviously what an addiction is and does! but my point here is i saw addiction as part of my personality, something i shouldn’t bother changing because it was going to come back one way or another, and it’d always outsmart me so by the time i noticed things were going bad again it’d be too late to change.

or, for another example, i used to think shame was part of my personality. i wrote about it extensively and for a long time (if you’ve been here for a while then you know, lol, thank you for sticking with me) because i thought that if i was able to fight shame with logic then i’d somehow be able to solve it by defeating my monstrous adolescence and co-exist with it. what i failed to factor in was that shame also grew its own embellishments; like, i’ve been eating variations of the same 2 breakfasts for 5 years because i live on some insane assumption that i can’t have anything else. or, i haven’t played the guitar in ages, and so even though i really want to play music again i can’t because i’m not allowed play or fantasy. it’s all cyclical stuff that has no substance whatsoever when you prod it, but it’s so much easier to keep following along when you think of these things as lodged so deep in you there’s no way to get them out.

---

action is the easiest remedy to this, though. i’ve been doing the artist’s way for 4 weeks now and i’ve found it immensely helpful (along with other things like actually going to therapy once a month sorry!) because of how much it encourages action and PLAY, the huge keyword i’ve been trying—not to drill into my skull necessarily, so much as i am lightly banging myself over the head with it in hopes that the reverberations knock something loose and give me a pleasant buzz. it’s been making me excavate and do things i wouldn’t normally do, like play my guitar very very badly, or have great conversations with strangers in coffee shops for 45 minutes. even in writing it down now it’s incomprehensible to me, especially in light of being told repeatedly as a child that i was too shy and quiet to exist, to the point that i owned 3 copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People by the time i was 10 (i didn’t buy any of them).

real ones know…art by david shrigley!

all of which is to say that i think it’s worth interrogating what we consider real or true about a personality, and how much of that might just be convenient reinforcement. like the shame cathexis, the obsessive tendency which finds and amplifies any possible instant for shame to arise, a lot of things are just…cycles. or just because they’re there, and they’re familiar. the question i’ve been asking myself at every juncture, when i’m unhappy with something about myself (behaviour, preferences), is whether familiarity is a good enough reason to keep doing it, if what it costs me is my dignity/my ability to answer to myself. and that ‘myself’ might change at any moment, so what matters is my ability to keep it moving and never ever despair.

---

thanks for reading! i know this is quite different from the analysis i usually do, but since we’re being honest here i’ll admit it’s because i allowed that angle to cannibalise a little too much of what i love, so i’m trying the personal angle out again as it’s been a while since i’ve taken that out for a spin. i’m still working on an spn s2 essay, though, it’s just taking a while because i have 2 jobs alongside my own writing practice so please bear with me and thanks so much for your patience + time as always and i will see you when i see you <3