At What Point In Your Life Did Your Personality Get "Set" (If Indeed, It Ever Did)

Allow me:

As Ailsa implies, this doesn't mean a codependency or a feeling of 'if I just had *somebody* my life would be happier,'

Is such an important lesson. Disengagement. Recognising when someone does exacerbate your worst qualities, and not letting them rile you up.

But it's really difficult when those people who do exacerbate your worst behaviour view such disengagement as being "la la, I can't hear you."

But it's really difficult when those people who do exacerbate your worst behaviour view such disengagement as being "la la, I can't hear you."

Right, so when you want to hear it, it's useful and you can learn from it. When it's something you *don't* want to hear, you can go "lalala not listening" and then claim you're disengaging for your own good when what you are actually doing is not wanting to hear something or deal with something because it's confronting your own personal insecurities and you're too egocentric to notice.

There's a marvellous little phrase you might want to bear in mind sometime. Namely "the truth hurts".

If you are going to continue to set out your personal bugbears for all to see, some people are going to react in ways you don't like. It won't do you a bit of harm to wonder if they actually have a point, rather than blithely "disengaging" (I'd call it ignoring, but, hey ho).

This is general advice, btw. I take criticism on board a lot - I've become a better and stronger person for it in some ways.

Stumbled over this thread doing a Search that was so remotely tangential to it that the connection was pure accident. There's a lot of fascinating discussion up thread, so I am reviving it.

As for me, I have a hard time grasping just what my personality consists of. My turn of mind is often quite literal-minded and simplistic, and so it is generally tethered very directly to whatever is under my nose.

Intellectually speaking, I instinctively submit to the wisdom of the Fool in King Lear, who said "Nothing comes of nothing, nuncle." Whatever my self is at this moment, it connects to what it was a few moments ago, and so on and on, following that thread down into the increasing dimness of the remote past. It all connects, right back to some unknown beginning. But what that amounts to in terms of my 'personality', it baffles me to say.

Taking another tack toward an answer to this conundrum, I once wrote a book. I was the only character in this book. When I wrote it, I had a good grip on what I was doing, but as other people read this book and I had a chance to talk to them about it, I discovered each reader had a different idea of what the book amounted to, which parts stood out, and which caught their interest. Their version was as valid as mine was. I suspect whatever my 'personality' is, it is much the same as what my book is - a complex thing that has no definitive version.

13

have you lost your tiller?