"My personality is not actually who I really am."
When I heard these words from yoga and meditation teacher Tracee Stanley a couple of years ago, my jaw dropped open. I was in the middle of interviewing her and wanted desperately to come across as someone who was wise and profound. With my open-mouthed reaction, I had abandoned all hope of coming across as deep; clearly, I had a lot of learning to do.
Humbled, I decided to take the opportunity to learn more and asked Tracee to elaborate. She explained that our personalities are a combination of who we are and what we have experienced. As she spoke, I thought about how my personality was shaped by the environment in which I was raised, the schools I went to, the events I witnessed, the highs and the lows that I lived through.
Since my interview with Tracee, I have heard more about the idea that we are not our personalities. As the thinking goes, we can put on and take off parts of our personality just as we layer or peel off our clothes. We can doll ourselves up with extra flair, protect ourselves by piling on heavy armor, or hide ourselves with complicated disguises. To keep our deepest selves safe, we can dial certain aspects of our personalities up or down, squaring up our shoulders to appear big and strong, or softening our words to appear nonthreatening. Our personality becomes an elaborate dance of revealing and hiding parts of ourselves in order to thrive in our environments.
Sometimes, bits of our personality become calcified by trauma or by time. Other times, like a snake shimmying from its skin, we shed parts of our personalities. If we're lucky, we may become re-acquainted with the parts of ourselves that were there before we developed personalities to protect them.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about my "self" and my personality. Since starting medication for anxiety and depression a few months ago, I have noticed that my personality has changed slightly and yet, I feel more myself than I have in years.
This came as a complete surprise.
Thinking of myself as more than my personality made sense to me intellectually. For example, I knew my personality would be different if I were raised with siblings in a bustling Northern city, instead of as an only child in the rural South. I knew also how much my personality had been shaped by moving from an ethnically diverse school in Charlotte to a predominately white school in rural North Carolina, by being exposed to West African culture throughout my childhood, by having three children, by being able bodied, and by many other factors.
But though I knew my personality was fluid, it was harder for me to understand this emotionally. Over time, I had picked up a number of personality traits to cope with stress and mounting responsibilities. At the same time, I started to see the world in blue-tinted glasses that made the iniquities of the world feel overwhelming. Eventually, it felt natural to think of myself as an anxious and melancholy person. That's just who I am, I thought.
So, when I entered a depression that refused to budge, I worried about taking medication. I worried I would lose the parts of myself that felt the most like me at the time. If I took away the melancholy part of myself, I wondered, what would be left?
In the end, I chose to seek out medication because I wanted to ease the worst of my suffering. I decided to trust that the deepest parts of me would remain.
I am glad I took this leap of faith. Medication did more than ease my depression – it allowed me to transcend the most unhelpful parts of my personality and become more myself.
In fact, I was able to tap into a more joyful version of myself that had been buried for so long I forgot she existed. I was also able to see more clearly the parts of my personality that don't actually feel like me. I can see the various layers I have put on over many years to protect myself – from stress, from vulnerability, from rejection, from hurt, from acknowledging my own imperfection.
Medication enabled me not only to see these defenses, but also to take them off, shedding them like a sweater in the summer now that their season is over.
Slowly, I am seeing more of myself in my personality. It's not that I never become anxious or melancholy. It's that I understand these aspects of my personality do not make up the entire core of who I am.
It's not all rainbows and butterflies. When I am being honest, I often feel sad that I needed medicine to bring me back to my most joyous self. For decades, I have worshipped at the altar of all things "natural" and resorting to a medication that wasn't "natural" and plant-based felt like failure.
Even after I made the choice to start medication, I had hoped that it would be a bridge that could help me cross from depression to joy – and that I could leave that bridge behind for good one day.
However, I don't know if that will be the case. Maybe I will be on an antidepressant for a season, just long enough to establish practices and habits that allow me to metabolize my stress and sadness in a healthy way. Or maybe I'll need an antidepressant long-term, the way one allergy pill won't stop me from sneezing forever, and one sip of water won't slake my thirst for all of eternity.
Whether I stay on medication for a season or a lifetime, I am thankful for the lesson it has taught me:
That I am more than my personality. That I can soften the sharpest edges of my personality like warm wax, that I can be more than the things that have happened to me, and more than the habits I have gathered over time.
That part of my personality is a self who has been there all along, joyous and caring and curious and very much me.
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