SoCS ‘Shape’ | Shaping the Personality

“We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.” – Albert Camus

We are all different and unique. There are billions of us around yet, no two people are the same. In spite of getting exposure to exactly the same kind of education, upbringing, environment and social circle there are unique traits within each of us that make us distinctive.

Which become a part of our personality, inner nature, temperament… whatever!

Often, a rhetoric has often been raised in our circles – “He is a changed man”, “She wasn’t always like this” and “She went there and has become radically different!” By these lines, we imply that a person has done a total roundabout of their inherent or previous personality. They have changed.

But here is the question – have they really changed? Or have they just re-shaped themselves? Is there really such a dynamic upheaval or just the illumination of a few subtle traits that were always floating beneath the surface?

I am going to draw an analogy here. Take a piece of clay. You can shape it, mould it, twist it and smash it into any form that you desire. Well, almost any. But the content, the matter of what that clay is made up of doesn’t change. That remains static. We just realign the raw material into different shapes.

We are the same! Our personalities don’t really undergo a change. A set of traits isn’t replaced by another. We re-shape, we develop, we tweak, and we add on a layer, we dig deeper. But we don’t go suddenly from Type A to Type B. With time and circumstances, some shades of our personality just realign themselves as per the need and priority. But our core canvas doesn’t change – we just add more colors! Some hues of the original personality we have got just imbibes them. With clay, the material doesn’t change unless you put it through some chemical or other scientific process (forgive me, I am a finance girl – so really not sure of the specifics). Same thing with us, unless some real shit happens and we get put through a massive grind – we really aren’t changing.

We are transforming. We are evolving. We are re-shaping.

Which is a beautiful thing.

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The prompt at Stream of Conscious Saturday was “shape”. This is my take on it. Do leave a comment below with your thoughts 🙂