A Personality for Your Children

This is a conversation I had with my godfather early on, and it stuck with me for a long time.

“Let them tell you what personality to have,” he said. Let the people you work with tell you how to be.

When we first had the conversation, I was confused by it. It’s one thing to say that you need to adapt your behavior—to wear a mask—for situations and people. It’s something else to say that you should let people tell you what personality to have. Personality is usually thought to be a stable description of the person, their motivations, and their behaviors. Most of my life, I’ve been wearing a mask of one kind or another, whether just professional behavior at work or simply not saying anything about what I was up to when people ask, pasting a smile on my face.

I was so used to wearing a mask that the idea that I don’t have to wear one came as a surprise. I was so used to thinking of adaptation as the process of wearing a mask that the idea of not keeping something carefully hidden for fear of judgement and rejection was just bizarre. Why wouldn’t I walk around making sure I had the right face, as I understood it, on for people to see?

The problem, of course, is that people will often intuit that you’re wearing a mask, and when you’re doing healing work, this is going to destroy trust between you.

On this side of my personal work, I see his point. When you destroy the ways in which you’re trying to be something you aren’t, when you destroy the false selves that your life has taught you, you can simply be whatever it is the person needs you to be. It takes the destruction of the ties ego has to you, but it’s one of the more important tools in a priest’s toolbox.

I am whatever you need me to be. I am who you need me to be, who your spirits need me to be. This is often not what you think you need—consciousness lags the spirit.

It’s quite possibly one of the most confounding but freeing things I have ever learned.